Sum of The Parts
by NotesfromaClassroom
Summary: Years before it takes his life, Jim Kirk tangles with the Nexus. Fortunately for him, this time he's not alone. An ensemble adventure where everyone has a story to tell.
1. Sulu

**Chapter One: Sulu**

**Disclaimer: I do not profit from writing about these characters.  
**

Hikaru Sulu stifles a yawn and glances at the chronometer on the helm. Fifteen more minutes until the end of delta shift—and with it, two days off duty until he rotates back to alpha shift for three weeks.

Not that he minds delta shift. Or at least, not much. It's certainly quieter with fewer crew members on the bridge. He has a chance to chat up people he doesn't see that often—Stiles and P'lath, for instance, navigators who often man the weapons console. And some of his good friends like Uhura usually work the same rotation he does.

The only drawback—if he wants to call it that—is that nine times out of ten Commander Spock is in the captain's chair during delta shift. And Sulu knows that when he rotates back to alpha shift in a few days, Spock will be there, too, as he always is, serving as first officer at the science station.

_Does the man never sleep?_

As if he is aware of Sulu's thoughts, the Commander speaks.

"You appear fatigued, Mr. Sulu."

Despite himself, Sulu feels a flush of embarrassment and annoyance. Turning in his seat, he starts to make an automatic denial, or failing that, to make light of what must be more apparent than he realizes.

Commander Spock is looking at him, his eyes dark and inscrutable.

From her station, Uhura crosses her arms and lifts one brow. Sulu abandons any idea of avoiding the truth.

"Uh, yes, sir," he says, nodding once. "I'm sorry."

"No need to apologize," Spock says evenly. "Human endurance does have limits."

It's the kind of comment that both raises Sulu's hackles and confounds him. A criticism of human strength? An implied boast about Vulcan abilities?

Or merely an inelegant commiseration, with something lost in translation when Spock says it?

Sulu glances again at the chronometer. Fourteen minutes until the end of the shift.

Suddenly the deck bucks beneath his feet and he topples forward onto the helm. The klaxon sounds and Sulu hears Spock say, "Captain to the bridge."

Scrambling back into his seat, Sulu lets his fingers play over the controls, calling up the data stream and scanning the engineering sensor logs.

"Report, Mr. Sulu," Spock says, his tone so ordinary, so unruffled, that Sulu feels oddly reassured.

"Sir," he says, "we were hit by a powerful gravimetric wave—I've never seen anything like it!"

"Origin?"

A question for the navigator, but on delta shift, the navigation controls are slaved to the helm. Sulu taps his monitor and says, "Unknown."

"Closest quasar?"

"Twelve parsecs. Too far to be responsible."

"Other charted anomalies?"

"The Brighton Nebula is three light years aft," Sulu says, frowning. "And the wave was traveling toward it, not from it."

"Viewscreen on," Spock says to Lt. Uhura.

The star field wavers into view—and in the distance, a thin rope of light and gas stretches and unfurls like a spool of cloth.

The turbolift doors whisk open and the captain strides forward. Spock smoothly rises and steps down from the captain's chair.

"Report," Captain Kirk says.

"Thirty-seven seconds ago the ship was hit with what appears to be a gravimetric wave. Origin undetermined."

From the corner of his eye, Sulu sees Spock cross the distance to the science station and squint into his raised scanner.

"Sensors show it consists of super-heated electromagnetic radiation, creating a temporal distortion field."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that the fabric of space-time is fluctuating at the edge of that energy pulse."

"Is the ship in danger?"

"Possibly. The radiation levels could compromise our hull integrity. I recommend retreating to a safe distance."

Sulu's fingers are already poised over the controls, anticipating the captain's orders. Before he can move, the ship lurches hard, the inertial dampeners flickering for a stomach-dropping millisecond.

"Back us away!" Captain Kirk says, and Sulu says, "Aye, Captain!"

But the helm is sluggish. The relative distance to the energy ribbon is unchanged, even after Sulu adjusts for the gravimetric pull. On the viewscreen, the image grows larger and brighter—and apparently closer to the ship.

"Mr. Sulu—"

"The helm isn't responding!" he says, his left hand tapping through the engine stats while his right hand scrolls over altitude control.

Sulu hears Kirk's fist bang down on the arm of the captain's chair.

"Scotty!" he says, but before he can continue, the chief engineer yells, "Captain, we're losing power! Whatever we've waded into is draining the warp coils!"

"What about impulse engines? I need something, Scotty!"

"Just barely working, Captain, though the aft thrusters are up. We can maneuver, but that's all."

"Captain," Spock says, a note of tension creeping into his voice at last, "if we do not retreat, we will be in direct contact with the energy ribbon in 17 seconds."

Sulu glances down at his console. The radiation sensor is spiking rapidly. On the viewscreen, the energy ribbon undulates like a snake.

Leaning forward in the captain's chair, Kirk says, "All decks, brace for impact. Sulu, head us into the wave."

"Captain," Sulu says, "if the wave is composed of ionized particles, we can set the deflectors to maximum and surf over the top instead."

"The structural stress will exceed recommended levels," Spock notes without a pause.

Taking a breath, Sulu plunges on.

"Not if we hit the wave at a 45 degree angle. The _Enterprise_ will be like a stone skipping on the top of the water."

"A rough ride," Kirk says.

Sulu sees the captain make eye contact with Spock—a question asked and answered, apparently. Spock raises one eyebrow and says, "We cannot outrun it. Mr. Sulu's idea may be all we have."

An unnamed expression darkens the captain's face and he says, "Do it!"

"Aye, sir!"

The writhing, twisting ribbon fills the viewscreen. Dully Sulu realizes that the red alert klaxon is blaring, the emergency lights blinking on and off. It's all up to him now. Wrapping his fingers tightly around the control bar, he uses the halting thrusters to aim the ship up and over the approaching wave.

"Impact in five, four, three, two, one—"

The ship shimmies and shakes and groans like a wounded animal. And then something snaps with a bang and Sulu flies backward over his seat, his head hitting the floor, the ship plunging into darkness.

X X X

During his second year at the Academy, Sulu took the bus tour up to Twin Peaks so many times that the driver began giving him a knowing wink when he got on—usually with a new female cadet in tow.

You haven't seen San Francisco until you've seen it from up here," Sulu would say as the bus careened around the hairpin turns and pulled into the gravel parking lot reserved for ground cars.

"See that sign?" Sulu exited the bus and pointed to a large metal square mounted prominently on the guardrail. "The one that says '_Ground Transportation Only. No air traffic within 1000 meters'_? It's there because of me."

The pretty cadet at his side visored her hand over her eyes. To the left Sulu could see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands. Ahead in the distance San Francisco lay sprawled out along the bay.

"You? You're the reason for the sign?"

The cadet's skepticism tripped so close to sarcasm that Sulu flashed her an uncertain smile.

"Look," he said, turning away from the view to the hill that rose behind the parking lot. "There was a communications tower up there—on the highest point. My friends and I used to buzz it for fun. You know, fly within a meter or two to scramble the signal. The city finally moved the tower, but they also decided to clear the view of flitters. I don't blame them, really. But it was fun while it lasted."

He had told this story so many times that he'd perfected it—the tone, the timing, the entire shtick never failing to garner him at least a laugh, some good will, a second date.

Not today, apparently. The cadet gave him a jaundiced look.

"Oh, yeah," she said, her glance drifting off as she spoke, "you did say you grew up here. So that's what high school boys did back in the day in San Francisco. I can imagine what you were like," she smirked. "Hotshot teenager making a public nuisance of yourself. Did you get your license taken away?"

It was Sulu's turn to smirk.

"Hardly," he said. "I was only ten at the time."

Although his story about the no fly zone sign was a practiced one, that didn't make it untrue. The first time Sulu climbed into a pilot's seat was one morning when he stayed home from school complaining of a sore throat and headache, one of the few mild viruses without an easy cure. His tenth birthday was only weeks away, though to his frustration, his mother continued to hover over him as if he were a small child.

"Get some rest, Hikaru," she said, tucking his quilt around him as he sniffed for dramatic effect in his bed. She started to leave and Sulu piped up.

"Can you get me a glass of water?"

His mother's eyes narrowed slightly—annoyance at being delayed, perhaps, or worry that he was acting coddled and dependent. Tipping his head on his pillow, he gazed up at her and gave a hesitant smile, like a supplicant begging a queen for favors.

It worked. His mother gave an exasperated laugh.

"Alright," she said, "but you're making me late."

He listened to the drumbeat of her shoes on the wooden floor as she stepped into the hall to the bathroom. A whoosh of the faucet—another set of footfalls—and his mother was back at the side of his bed, a small clear glass of water in her hand.

"Here," she said, but he motioned to the small bedside table.

"I'm not thirsty right now," he said, flashing what he hoped looked like contrition. "Can you put it there?"

With an exaggerated sigh she set down the glass and shook her head. In another moment he heard her walking down the hall—the snick of the opening coat closet, the jangle of hangers, a thud that was probably his mother setting her briefcase on the small table beside the front door, checking to make sure she had all the legal briefs she had brought home to work on last night.

Usually his mother took public transport to her office in the city, leaving her vintage '39 _Galaxie_ in the car park under the tall apartment building where the Sulus had lived since before their children were born. His brother, Ichiro, was two years older, the quintessential firstborn who spent far too much energy trying to please his parents.

Hikaru, on the other hand, learned early that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission.

As soon as he heard the front door shut, he was out of the bed, shuffling softly across the floor to his dresser, swapping his pajamas for a heavy shirt and jeans.

Down the hall his father was still sleeping. For the past six months Satoru Sulu had led a research team at the Bay Area Botanical Research Center studying nyctinastic flora, both Terran and off-world. Often he brought cuttings from the various plants home, lining the kitchen windowsill with small pots of experimental poppies and heather-like flowers that closed their petals and curled into protective puffs of color when the sun went down—a phenomenon that never failed to delight his younger son.

"If the plants you study sleep at night, why do you sleep in the daytime?" Sulu asked his father once, and his father had laughed and ruffled his hair affectionately.

"It's because they sleep at night that I work at the lab then. I want to figure out what the plants are dreaming about," his father teased.

Tiptoeing past his parents' bedroom, Sulu carried his canvas shoes in one hand and the glass of water balanced on his other palm. Careful to keep his fingers off the side of the glass, he lifted it to his mouth and gulped the water until the glass was empty. Then slipping on his shoes and unlocking the door, he paused for a moment when a noise like a sigh or a snore broke the silence.

_Was his father awake?_ Sulu stood motionless in the hall and listened. When he heard nothing else after a few moments, he stuck his fist inside the glass and tipped it over, letting it slide onto his hand.

The car park under the apartment building was ungated and unmanned, and Sulu quickly made his way to his mother's flitter. Silver and turquoise, it gleamed in the dim overhead light.

On the pilot's side was the entry pad, keyed to respond to his mother's touch. Because biometric coding eliminated the need for keys or locks, a simple scan of her thumb both opened the car and turned on the ignition inside.

Safe and foolproof, unless, of course, the mischief maker was a nine year old boy just itching to take a flitter for his first flight.

Tapping the entry pad, Sulu alerted the car that he wanted entry. A thin infrared trip line appeared, a scanner waiting for Yoko Sulu's thumb.

Which at that moment was attached to the rest of her on the #31 bus turning a corner on Market Street near her law office.

Not a problem. Sulu might not have his mother's thumb, but he had her thumbprint. At least, he hoped he did.

Holding up the glass to the infrared scanner, he held his breath.

_Nothing._ Sulu rotated the glass gently so that the scanner could read the other side.

_Still nothing._ Slipping his fingertips around the bottom of the glass, he held it up once more, this time angling the lip of the glass at the scanner.

With a click, the door unlocked.

"I'm in!" he said out loud, his voice echoing in the large car park. Swiveling slowly, he looked around, but he was alone and no one had heard him. He tugged open the flitter door and slid into the pilot's seat.

It was just as he had imagined it—smooth and cool and _powerful. _ Now that he was sitting behind them, the controls that looked so ordinary when he was a passenger were suddenly worthy of his closest attention. Buttons and latches and tabs—just waiting for him. Holding up the lip of the glass to the ignition scanner, he heard the flitter roar to life.

And he was off! The flitter lifted up a meter from the concrete floor and he toggled forward, slowly at first, and then coming out from the car park, hitting the accelerator so hard that his jaw snapped shut and his head hit the headrest.

He didn't go far—not that first time—just around the block. By the time his father woke up and started getting ready for work, Sulu was back in bed, the quilt pulled up to his chin, his face as flushed as if he really did have a fever.

He managed to take the flitter out once more before getting caught, taking a curve too low and scraping the paint from the left stabilizer, something his brother innocently pointed out the next time the family took an outing.

"I haven't been anywhere for this to happen!" his mother exclaimed as she circled the flitter, looking for other scrapes and nicks.

Standing behind her in the car park, Sulu's father threw up his hands and said, "Don't look at me!"

"Then it must have been whoever parks on that side! I'm calling the management to find out the name—"

Sulu's heart was beating so hard that he could hardly hear his next words.

"Don't call!"

His mother rounded on him so fast that later he would wonder if she didn't already have some idea what he had been doing.

"What do you know about this?" she said, and he squirmed visibly.

"I did it," he said, casting his eyes down. "The last time I flew it."

"The _last_ time! You mean you've done this more than once?"

Darting a glance at his father, Sulu saw an odd look cross his face, as if he were struggling not to smile or laugh. His mother, on the other hand, was furious.

"Hikaru Sulu!"

He didn't remember everything that happened then. His brother's scandalized expression, his father literally turning away, his mother saying something about being lucky he wasn't killed—brief images of that day turning into a longer, fuller image of sitting in his living room, his mother and father standing in front of him, their faces turned first to each other and then to him, as if they were unsure who would speak first, his father finally saying, "Your mother and I know that you will probably keep trying to fly, and we'd rather you did it under supervision."

And then he handed him a small piece of paper with the name of a children's flight club printed across the top, the instructor's name below, and at the very bottom, a place where his parents had already signed their permission, with a slot for him to fill in his name.

The club replaced everything else that used to entertain him. Gone were afternoons playing digital games with friends, riding his two-wheeler, watching adventure vids. Every Saturday morning his mother dropped him off at a small park near the Starfleet Academy grounds where he and the other children practiced simple maneuvers in half-size safety trainers. Sometimes when he was aloft he could make out the red uniformed cadets crossing the commons or walking between buildings.

"I'm going there when I graduate," he told his flight instructor, a paunchy man who nodded sagely and said, "Don't be in such a hurry to grow up."

But he was. Grown ups didn't have to study things that didn't interest them—poetry and calculus and the history of places he didn't want to visit. Grown ups did things they wanted to—stayed up past bedtime reading _The Three Musketeers_, took the flitter for secret flights on sunny afternoons when no one else was home.

One evening as he was clearing the table from supper, Sulu heard the front door chime. His mother was in the kitchen, his father in the shower getting ready for work. Sulu pulled open the door and saw two uniformed police officers on the top of the steps.

"Are your parents home, son?" the shorter officer said, and Sulu nodded, breaking into a cold sweat. Before he could call his mother, she was at his side, wiping her hands on her apron.

"Can I help you?" she said, and the same officer spoke again.

"We've had some complaints about someone at this address making unauthorized flights over Twin Peaks. The communications tower operator was able to get a pretty good picture with the surveillance camera."

He held out a PADD and Sulu saw an image of his mother's flitter—blurry but unmistakably hers.

Without looking up, he felt her eyes boring into him.

"Thank you, officer," she said brusquely. "This will be taken care of immediately."

"Ma'am," the other officer said, speaking up for the first time, "you need to know that the area has been designated a no fly zone now. If anyone in this house approaches it again, they will be arrested."

"I see," Sulu's mother said. "I assure you, that is the least of his troubles."

The rest of that evening was a blur—his mother angrily berating him, his father with a towel draped around his shoulders drawn to the noise, Ichiro wandering past like an onlooker at a wreck, a hint of unbrotherly triumph on his features.

To his surprise, his parents didn't force him to quit the flying club or to make promises they knew he wouldn't or couldn't keep. Instead, the next time his mother dropped him off at the park near the Academy, he saw a new instructor waiting—apparently just for him. Walking past the other children lined up for turns in the trainers, this instructor was a tiny woman with Asian features, her cropped hair more gray than black.

"Hikaru," she said with a slight incline of her head. "This way, please."

From the corner of his eye he could see the other children watching him as he followed the woman to the far end of the park where a late model _Starcruiser_ flitter was parked.

"If you're going to fly, you need to learn to _really_ fly," she said. With a flick of her thumb she unlatched the flitter door and Sulu started to scramble into the pilot's seat.

"Not yet," she said, her hand darting out and clutching his forearm. "You watch."

With a sheepish grin, he circled around the front of the flitter and got in the passenger side. The Asian woman pulled herself into the pilot's seat and said, "I am Commander Ito. If you touch anything, if you say anything foolish, this will be your last ride."

And so he watched in silence as she started the engine and lifted off so quickly that he felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck.

"You like that, eh?" she said, and he risked a nod.

"And this?"

The flitter went into a freefall spiral and Sulu gasped, his breakfast rising to his throat. When the flitter leveled off over the bay he squeaked out, "Not so much."

"Better," the Commander said. "If you are never afraid, you'll get yourself killed one day."

For a long time, lessons with Commander Ito were usually Sulu watching her pilot the flitter while she kept up a running patter.

"See that line of clouds forming by the headlands? There will be an updraft right before you lose visibility when you head through them, so be ready for it and adjust the altitude control. Notice how the fuel indicator fluctuated when I accelerated? And that gauge there. If it ever lights up, stop what you're doing as soon as you can."

By the time he qualified for an unrestricted license, Sulu had graduated to first level aerobatics and some formation flying, usually with Commander Ito in the other craft but sometimes with Jeri, a friend from the flying club who started taking lessons soon after Sulu began. During the week he and Jeri would sometimes meet at the park and practice, just the two of them, hoping to startle the retired Starfleet commander into praise during the regular Saturday sessions.

They never did.

The only people who ever seemed impressed were the occasional Academy cadets who sometimes lingered at the park fence to watch them fly. From the air they were easy to spot—their red uniforms glowing in the sunlight.

One visitor, in particular, caught Sulu's attention—a tall, thin cadet with the severe haircut and upswept eyebrows of a Vulcan—or so Sulu assumed. He'd never met a Vulcan in person and saw them on the news holovids rarely, despite Vulcan having an embassy in San Francisco.

"I don't remember any from my time in service," Commander Ito said when Sulu asked about the Vulcan cadet. "They're pretty self-contained and private. That's good to see, though. Overdue, if you ask me. Starfleet needs to do a better job of recruiting off-worlders."

The Commander was one person who didn't try to discourage him from growing up fast. When he confided his plans to apply for early admission to the Academy, she gave a little shrug and said, "Good. You know what you want."

When his application was denied—his academic performance not up to par—she shrugged again.

"Good. Now you know what you have to improve."

"Buckle down," his mother told him when he showed her the rejection letter. "Or get a tutor. Stop spending all your time flying."

He took her first two suggestions seriously, setting his alarm for 5 every morning so he would have an extra hour every day to study. In the afternoons he stayed after school for extra help from his teachers.

His mother's third suggestion—that he stop flying so much—was ridiculous, of course. If anything, he and Jeri met more regularly for their informal sessions in the park, often gathering an audience, including the Vulcan cadet, who Sulu noted had given up his red uniform for a dull gray one.

The Vulcan was watching the day of the crash, too—when he and Jeri were practicing a corkscrew formation. On paper it was a simple maneuver—two fitters flying belly-to-belly straight up from launch, and then at the apex of the flight, reversing direction and heading back to land, still facing away from each other, but this time spiraling slowly until peeling up and away just before reaching the ground.

On the day of the crash they had almost finished the corkscrew when Jeri's right aileron broke loose and her flitter stalled and plummeted to the ground, rolling over several times before coming to a stop, pilot side down, bursting into flames.

Without quite knowing how, Sulu made an impossibly sharp loop up and over, landing hard and leaping out beside the burning flitter. Dimly he was aware that in the distance a siren was blaring, that people were running across the grassy park toward him. With a wrenching tug, he pulled open the passenger door of Jeri's flitter and clambered in.

Jeri was awake but dazed.

"Release the catch!" he yelled, motioning to the seat restraint lock. When she didn't move, he leaned over her and slid the lock forward until he felt it unhitch. Then putting his arms around Jeri's waist, he hoisted them both back up through the open passenger door.

Or tried to. The smoke from the fire was acrid and sooty, making him cough so hard that he almost let go of Jeri. If he could only get his legs back out of the flitter, he could lever her out.

But in her dazed state Jeri was unhelpful dead weight. He would have to let go of her to get himself out first.

Still, he was reluctant to do so. She would slide back down and he might not be able to reach her if he did. He felt a wave of despair as another flame licked up through the control panel.

He wasn't sure what happened next. As he squatted inside the flitter, he felt himself being lifted up and out by someone behind him. Frantically he tightened his grip on Jeri and she came up with him in his arms, tumbling out onto the ground after him, coughing and retching, and like him, helped to her feet and taken a safe distance from the burning flitter. His eyes were watering and his hands were blistered—probably from grabbing the outside latch—but he was essentially unhurt.

As was Jeri, whose broken ankle was the worst of her injuries. For weeks afterwards they talked about the accident in hushed tones, like people still half-asleep.

"We were lucky," Jeri said, and Sulu didn't disagree.

But something still niggled at the edge of his memories from that day—the missing pieces, the way he couldn't keep the chronology straight, the sensations that had no counterpart in reality.

Like the voice he had heard in his head telling him what to do as he wrapped his arms around Jeri—_stay calm, focus, hold on, I have you._

And something else, too—something deeper than words, or beyond them. A rush of feeling he's never been able to name: admiration and concern and encouragement in equal measure—not his own feelings but coming from someone else, someone unseen.

X X X

As the emergency lights flutter on Sulu stands up, moving back to his station. All around him the bridge crew are recovering—some visibly shaken—and underneath the rustle he hears the chiming of Uhura's comm board as departments all over the ship check in.

"Engineering reports warp drive inoperative," she says, corroborating Sulu's indicators. From behind him he hears the captain say, "Casualties?"

"Dr. McCoy reports minor injuries throughout the ship."

His own report is succinct. The _Enterprise's_ deflector shields had cocooned the ship from the worst of the wave, just as he had postulated. Though they are without warp drive, the impulse engines are still online. They can move. They just can't go anywhere very fast.

"If Scotty can't make repairs here, we can call for a tug from Starbase 11," Captain Kirk says. "At least we are in one piece."

"Due to the skill of Mr. Sulu."

_Praise from Commander Spock_—for a moment Sulu is so flabbergasted that he forgets to breathe.

The captain, too, seems caught off guard by his words.

"Yes, of course," he says. "Well done, Mr. Sulu."

"Thank you, sir." A pause, and then Sulu says, "_Sirs._"

If he looks at Commander Spock he knows what he'll see—a raised eyebrow, a quirk about his mouth that is as close to amusement as he ever shows.

He's never asked Spock about the day of Jeri's crash and isn't sure he needs to. It's enough to believe that they were both there, drawn by necessity to that same point in time, that his piloting skill is understood and appreciated, that what he does matters.

It's also why delta shift is a challenge, the strain of living up to that unspoken expectation each time Commander Spock sits in the captain's chair.

But he doesn't have time to think about it now. Uhura calls out, "Captain! I'm picking up a distress call. An automatic beacon from a personal cruiser."

"On screen."

The viewscreen is filled with static and wobbly lines—leftover radiation buzzing along the external antennae, Sulu thinks—but in the center he can make out a small craft, not much larger than a luxury flitter.

From the science station Spock says, "Apparently the cruiser was also caught by the energy ribbon, captain. I detect a single life form."

"Hail them," the captain says, and Uhura presses her earlink with her index finger.

"No response."

Suddenly a radiation alert sounds on the helm and Sulu toggles the navigation actuator.

"Captain, the warp engine on that cruiser is going critical."

"Too small to pose a threat," Spock says.

"Not to that one lifeform! Transporter room, lock onto these coordinates. One to beam aboard. Security, report to the transporter room."

With a flick of his wrist Sulu sends the coordinates to the transporter room, but a moment later he sees a brilliant flash as the cruiser's engines ignite and explode.

**A/N: Ready, set, go! Each chapter of this story will do double duty, carrying the adventure forward while giving a backwards glimpse into the lives of the crew. If I do it right, that backwards glimpse will give insight into why each crew member's contribution is essential to the ship..and to each other.**

**Whether that works or not, please let me know! Launching a new story is always scary, and reviews let me know you are out there!  
**

**Thanks to Startrekfanwriter for her suggestions. She is busy writing both fanfiction and original fiction over in the "Thor" fandom. Check out her work in my faves.**

**If you're looking for more Star Trek: TOS adventures, check out "Changelings" in my profile. And if you want some Star Trek 2009 fiction to tide you over until the sequel hits the theaters in May, there's a list of my stories in that AU over in my profile. Enjoy!  
**


	2. Spock

**Chapter Two: Spock**

**Disclaimer: These are old friends, not possessions, and I make no money from reporting on what I see them do.**

James Kirk slams his hand down on the intercom button on the arm of his chair—slams it with unnecessary force, though Spock is no longer surprised by such emotional displays.

When Kirk had first succeeded Christopher Pike as captain two years ago, Spock had been alarmed by his demeanor—quicksilver, volatile, his impulsive behavior masking a deliberate, intense focus that for a time Spock distrusted. Captain Pike, by contrast, had been mature, tempered, rarely raising his voice, every move calculated and economical.

For a few months after Captain Pike left to train cadets at the Academy, Spock had seriously considered applying for a transfer. Not that he didn't think James Kirk was a competent officer worthy of respect. Clearly he was or Starfleet wouldn't have promoted him.

But he and the captain were so dissimilar—their temperaments and personalities almost at odds—that he thought it might be more logical, more efficient, to find a place where he would be more comfortable.

He had already started scouting the boards for other postings for science officer when the _Enterprise_ was damaged by the journey through the galactic barrier and Gary Mitchell died on Delta Vega—_in the line of duty_, the captain reported, though Spock recognized the log entry for what it was, a deception. Privately Spock had taken his concerns about the log to Lt. Uhura. After all, she would be the one to relay it to Starfleet. If the captain's log was an obvious fiction, she could also be held to account.

"I'm not worried," she told him over a cup of coffee in the deserted officers mess shortly after a tug from Starbase 31 showed up to tow the _Enterprise_ back for repairs. "Who would ever question it?"

"Perhaps no one," Spock said, "but an inaccuracy will remain in the log."

He watched as she lifted her cup to her lips and took a sip, as if what he had just said was not particularly alarming. She must not have understood the gravity of the situation. He tried again.

"The official, registered log will not be true," he said. "Mr. Mitchell was attempting to kill the captain at the time of his death. He did not die _in the line of duty_."

He gave the phrase the sort of slight emphasis he had heard his mother give when she wanted to impart a sense of irony or contradiction to her words. The lieutenant set her cup down on the table and sighed.

"Sir," she said slowly, "there's more than one type of truth. Mr. Mitchell died because of the things that happened to him while he was serving on this ship. He didn't want to change into…what he became. You can't blame him for that. Or hold him accountable, either. So yes, I think the captain is right. He died in the line of duty."

From the cant of her head, the wrinkle on her brow, he knew better than to continue to argue with her.

Later that night as he meditated in front of his _asenoi _in his quarters, he consciously let go of his concern about the accuracy of the log entry. Pursuing the matter might provoke the captain or call Lt. Uhura's work into question. Then, too, there was a chance that fabricating a detail to protect a friend was one of those uniquely human actions that Spock found baffling and always would.

A week later Kirk approached him about serving as his first officer—and though he harbored some misgivings, Spock accepted.

"Transporter room," the captain says now, his hand fisted on the intercom button, "tell me that you got them."

"Aye, captain," the transporter chief says. "Or something. I'm not sure what it is."

"Explain."

"It's not alive, captain. I mean, I don't think it is. It looks like some kind of a machine."

From his station Sulu darts a glance.

"There were biological signs aboard," the helmsman says quickly. "Those are the ones I gave the transporter room."

"Mr. Spock," the captain says, rising from his chair and heading to the lift. By now Spock recognizes the familiar invitation in the captain's voice—not to fill the captain's chair but to accompany him. He toggles off the data screen at the science station and follows.

"Is it possible the cruiser wasn't manned?" Kirk asks as soon as the lift starts moving. Spock considers.

"Negative, Captain. My scans showed an oxygen conversion rate indicative of biological respiration."

They fall silent until the lift stops. Twenty meters down the corridor Spock sees a security guard standing at the door of the transporter room. Hurrying from the other end of the corridor are Dr. McCoy and Nurse Chapel, each with medkits in their hands.

"Any survivors?" the doctor asks as he presses past the security guard. He stops so abruptly that Spock has to step to the side to keep from colliding with him.

"If this is your idea of a joke, Jim," the doctor says, and even Spock can hear the anger in his voice. "I was told you had an emergency beam out—"

Captain Kirk either doesn't hear or chooses to ignore the doctor's annoyance.

"Bones, could someone be _inside_ that thing?"

The _thing_ the captain refers to is a metallic oblong object less than a meter long and half as wide. Lying on the transporter pad, it does resemble a machine, with a seal running along one axis and two recessed buttons at the narrow end.

"My tricorder indicates no life signs," Spock says, moving to the edge of the transporter pad and leaning forward. From the corner of his eye he sees one of the security officers move closer, his phaser drawn.

"Could…_this_…be the pilot of the cruiser?"

"Jim, in case you haven't noticed, that is a box. It couldn't have flown anything."

A rustle from behind Spock as the doctor sets his medkit down, apparently deciding that the item on the transporter pad does not need his attention.

"What you call a _box_ is made of a duranium alloy," Spock says, adjusting his tricorder. "It could be functioning as an escape pod with the life form inside."

"A very small life form," Dr. McCoy says. Although his words are straightforward, something about his tone is off. _Skepticism?_ Spock darts a glance in his direction and sees that the doctor's arms are crossed.

"Or a compact one," the captain adds.

"Or young," Spock says. "This could be an incubator, Captain, that was programmed to be jettisoned if the cruiser ran into difficulty."

Dr. McCoy sighs and uncrosses his arms.

"Okay, you've made your point. Let's get it to sickbay and take a look."

One of the security officers steps onto the pad and reaches around the metallic container, lifting it slowly. Judging from the speed at which the officer stands and regains his balance, Spock estimates that the object weighs less than 12 or 13 kilos.

Almost at once the small buttons on it begin flashing—a piercing blue-white light pulsing rapidly. Startled, the security officer stumbles and takes an awkward step forward. Reaching out to steady him, Spock places his right hand on the side of the container to keep it from falling to the floor.

And that's the last thing he remembers for the next three hours.

X

Crime on Vulcan was not unheard of, but it was rare. Even among people who prized emotional control, someone occasionally slipped and let a fist fly in a moment of anger; coveted to the point of theft a valued possession; forced unwanted and unlooked for sexual attention on another. The perpetrators were treated like anyone else with a mental illness—with confinement and therapy with trained healers until health was restored.

Except for those who forced themselves on others through mind assault. In a world of touch telepaths, nothing was as valued as mental privacy, nothing as shameful as its loss.

Those who violated another's mind were expelled from society—either by forced incarceration or by exile off the planet. The _v'tosh katur_, for instance—the Vulcans who embraced emotions—were rumored to participate in mind assaults, though Spock had heard conflicting reports.

"Do not believe everything you hear," Sybok told him once when Spock asked about a boy at school whose parents were rumored to be members of a growing number of _v'tosh katur_ practitioners in Shi'Kahr. Something in Sybok's tone warned Spock away from asking anything more.

Later, of course, he wished he had.

The boy's name was Tavik, and as teenagers both he and Sybok were so busy with preparation for the Vulcan Science Academy entrance exams that they didn't leave school until late in the afternoon, long after the younger children were dismissed. Rather than have his mother make a trip from home to pick him up only to have to go back out later for Sybok, Spock often stayed late while the older boys met with their tutors.

He didn't mind spending the afternoons this way. The elderly chess master Truvik sometimes offered him a cup of tea and an impromptu match in his office, or Spock ambled around the extensive school grounds, collecting various species of small amphibians and insects to study for an afternoon before releasing them.

At the beginning of Sybok's terminal year, Tavik's family provided him with a groundcar—an old-fashioned wheeled vehicle that required helium cells for fuel. With undisguised enthusiasm, Tavik volunteered to take over Amanda's school transport duties—despite the fact that swinging by Sybok and Spock's home was out of his way.

"Why is it that teenaged boys all share the same love of vehicles?" Spock overheard his mother telling Sarek as they sat on the outside portico one evening.

The afternoon heat still lingered but the cooler desert air was starting to blow, and as she often did, Amanda sat in one of the woven chairs with a cup of tea balanced on the armrest. Sarek usually joined her, though for what purpose Spock could not puzzle out. More often than not when he wandered after them and nosed around, they were doing nothing more than sitting within close proximity and chatting about inconsequential things.

"Sybok has not expressed much of an interest," Sarek murmured. It was true that Sybok had never asked about getting his pilot's license, and when Sarek offered to teach him to fly the family flitter, Sybok had begged off, saying that he was too busy to learn.

On the other hand, Spock knew for a fact that Sybok took Sarek's hoverbike out of storage and tooled around in the yard when the adults weren't home.

"Thank goodness," Amanda said. "One less thing for me to have to worry about."

Her concern was the reason she initially refused to let Spock and Sybok ride to school and back with Tavik. Then Sarek was called away to help negotiate a trade agreement between a Vulcan outpost and the Nagirini homeworld and Amanda decided to go with him.

"I haven't been off-world for ages," she said in answer to Spock's unasked question. "And your father and I need some time alone once in awhile."

At 17, Sybok was certainly able to care for himself and his 7 year-old-brother for two weeks. The only problem was transportation. With a sigh, Amanda pursed her lips and agreed to let them ride back and forth to school with Tavik.

Unlike a flitter, a groundcar was limited to the route it could take, but Spock didn't care. To his surprise he found riding in the moving car exhilarating, particularly on the days when Sybok sprawled out in the back and left the front passenger seat for him.

The landscape hurtling by never failed to interest him—not just the actual scenery, but the challenge of calculating the ground speed and predicting the precise time they would pass certain points on the route.

Once Tavik realized what Spock was doing—why his nose was pressed to the side glass, his attention focused on the landmarks whirling past—he began accelerating and slowing unpredictably, making the calculations much harder—and consequently more interesting.

"Leave him alone!" Sybok called from the back seat when Tavik sped up so quickly that Spock had to struggle to stay upright. But Spock could hear the amusement in Sybok's tone—and apparently so could Tavik. He reached over and gave Spock a quick pat on the head—a fleeting touch that reminded Spock of the way he himself sometimes stroked I-Chaya's shaggy mane—but it caught him off guard and he ducked away.

For two weeks the three boys commuted together in Tavik's ground car.

And then on the afternoon before Sarek and Amanda were scheduled to return, Spock was waiting at the car park after school when Tavik appeared, weighed down by a backpack loaded with study PADDs and exercise equipment.

"Where is Sybok?" Spock asked as he opened the groundcar boot and helped Tavik stow his things there.

"With Professor T'Sil preparing a presentation for her level two Laplace transform class. He'll be out in a few minutes."

Shutting the boot, Tavik walked around and opened the car doors, sliding into the driver's seat. After hesitating a moment, Spock took the passenger seat up front.

Even for Spock, the car was hot and uncomfortable. Leaving the door open to catch some fresh air, he sat sideways, his feet sticking out, so he could watch for Sybok.

The noise of the engine turning over startled him.

"Close the door and I'll turn on the temperature controls," Tavik said. Pulling his feet in and grabbing the handle, Spock tugged the door closed.

As he turned to adjust the seat restraint, he saw Tavik's hand dart out.

"I am not going to hurt you," Tavik said, his fingers slipping along Spock's jaw, splaying across his brow and cheek to connect to Spock's psi points. Already a tendril of Tavik's mind was in his own—pushing his shields aside and weighing him down like a physical presence.

_No!_ Spock cried out soundlessly, but Tavik was insistent, probing Spock's early memories, looking at the world through his eyes—_Amanda lifting him into her arms, Sarek holding out a piece of fruit for him to grasp._

_No,_ Spock said, this time as if from a great distance, like someone too tired to protest.

Tavik held up Spock's feelings for review, not bothering to hide his distaste.

_Spock's curiosity that led him to secretly dissemble things around his house, such as the family ka'athyra or the irrigation system in the garden—no one the wiser when he reassembled them again, satisfied as to how they worked._

_His confusion about Sybok's peripatetic life, the way his older brother split his time between Sarek's home and an unseen maternal grandmother, his unvoiced distress when Sybok left for weeks or months at a time. _

_The heat of embarrassment when the children outside the school eyed him askance as he got out of his mother's flitter in the mornings, their muted laughter, their barely concealed whispers and slurs. _

_His shame about having such feelings, of letting them show, of disappointing his father with their display._

Spock was gasping now, his mouth opening and closing reflexively like a Terran fish, but Tavik kept his fingers on his face.

"Stop," Spock managed to say aloud, but already he knew that Tavik would not stop, that this intrusion was something that Tavik found satisfying or necessary.

Closing his eyes, Spock felt his head pounding and his stomach starting to sour.

"What are you doing!"

Sybok's voice, not directed at him. Suddenly the connection was broken and Tavik was gone, pulled from the car. Spock doubled over, tucking his knees to his chest.

A thud and several grunts; then the door on the passenger side of the car jerked open and Spock felt Sybok's hands brush his shoulders and arms, as if feeling for broken bones.

"Can you walk?"

Opening his eyes, Spock saw Sybok's face close to his own, his expression a mixture of grief and fury.

Instead of answering, Spock slid forward out of the car and stood up, wobbly but upright.

"I...am uncertain."

He blinked slowly and leaned against the side of the car.

In a rush, Sybok disappeared and Spock heard his voice, raised and angry, over the definite sounds of a scuffle.

"You have hurt my brother!"

"I did not!"

Taking one tentative step and then another, Spock made his way around the car. Tavik was prone on the tarmac, Sybok straddling him, one fist gripping the front of his tunic, the other pulled back ready to strike him again.

"You are also a liar!" Sybok said, and even from where he stood, Spock could hear a sickening crunch as Sybok's fist made purchase with Tavik's nose.

Dark green blood splattered on their clothes and on the ground as Tavik flailed his arms wildly, trying to deflect Sybok's punches.

"He is a human!" Tavik panted. "I could not hurt him!"

Fist raised, Sybok paused and stared. Taking his hesitation for permission to continue, Tavik went on.

"I have never melded with an alien before," he said, his lips already swelling and making his words muddled and indistinct. "I was merely curious. I did nothing wrong."

"You melded without his consent!"

"He is not a Vulcan, Sybok. His consent is irrelevant."

With a disgusted huff, Sybok released his hold and stood up. Tavik's head fell back to the ground and he lifted his hand to his mouth, dabbing at the blood.

Despite his eidetic memory—or perhaps because of it—Spock could not recollect what happened next. Somehow he and Sybok found their way home. _A ride from one of the tutors, perhaps? Or had they walked?_

That night when Sarek and Amanda returned, Spock stayed curled in his bed while Sybok relayed what had happened—first with words and then by showing through the family bond his own part in it, the pictures of Tavik broken and bloody disturbingly gratifying.

As Spock expected, his mother rushed immediately to his bedroom, sitting on the bed beside him and smoothing his hair with such a gentle stroke that he found himself drifting off to sleep.

His father's reaction was the one that surprised him. At some level Spock expected him to blame him for what happened—as if he had provoked or enticed Tavik merely by being who he was—in Tavik's words, an _alien_, a non-Vulcan with no rights and questionable telepathic ability.

But Sarek's anger was swift and fierce and so frightening that Amanda cautioned him to reassure Spock that it was not aimed at him. After informing the authorities about Tavik's assault, Sarek took the flitter before anyone else rose the next morning and returned in a few hours with a healer so elderly and stooped that she had to keep one hand on Sarek's forearm as she made her way inside the house.

From his bedroom where he lay bundled in a nest of quilts on his bed, Spock heard his mother say, "Lady T'Sarr, I'm so grateful that you are here."

"The boy?"

"This way," his father said, and Spock watched as his father led T'Sarr to the chair his mother must have pulled up next to his bed. _Had she sat there all night? _How odd that he didn't know.

The chair creaked softly as T'Sarr lowered herself slowly into it. Behind her his father stood, seemingly implacable. His mother waited at the door, her eyes unusually red-rimmed, her face waxy and pale in a way that made Spock uneasy.

For a moment T'Sarr said nothing, her dark eyes hooded, flat, unreadable. Then she glanced over her shoulder and said, "Leave us." Spock's heart began to race as his parents withdrew, but his attention was pulled almost immediately to the elderly healer as she lifted one hand toward him.

Spock shivered involuntarily.

T'Sarr lowered her hand at once.

"I will not hurt you," she said, her voice low and graveled with age. Tilting her head, she said, "But you have been told that before."

Spock shivered again. _How did she know?_ The very words Tavik had uttered as he began the assault. Were Spock's thoughts still on display?

As if she could, indeed, read his mind, T'Sarr said, "It is what all abusers say. Your thoughts are your own now, Spock."

She stayed with him most of the afternoon, often saying nothing for long stretches of time, sometimes asking him innocent questions about school, about his interests. He volunteered little that she did not ask for directly, but by the time she called for Sarek to take her home, he felt a small measure of relief.

"I can do no more for him," she said as she took Sarek's arm and stood up. Through the family bond Spock felt his father's dismay.

"If I melded with him directly—to augment his psi ability—could you—"

Spock's face flushed with shame, though whether his own or his father's he wasn't certain.

T'Sarr looked back at Spock, still nested in his quilts, and said, "Spock? His psi ability is exceptional, one of the strongest telepaths I have ever known. He does not need your help," she said, turning back to Sarek. "He needs a master at Gol."

The monastery at Gol was where Kolinahr adepts lived and studied, practicing a mental discipline so rigorous that few acolytes advanced to the goal of true freedom from emotion.

The monastery itself rose up in the desert like a fortress, which at one time in Vulcan's history it had been. Now its doors were never closed, its rooms always open for guests, both casual and serious.

The master who agreed to meet with Sarek and Spock was one of the younger monks, barely 200 years old, though to Spock he looked ancient, his hair silver, his knuckles knotted with wear. His name was Sylan, and both his name and his lilting accent suggested he was from the rural part of the northern continent rather than from the capital, something Spock found oddly comforting.

He showed them to their room—spartan, carved out of the rock edifice that made up most of the monastery. A single window looked out over a bleak desert landscape. The lighting was low—deliberately so—and the wooden bunks were covered with thin blankets that offered little protection from the cool nights—also deliberate.

_Surmount the distractions._ One of the many lessons the monks endeavored to both learn and teach daily.

Spock quickly fell into the rhythm of the monastic life. Each morning the monks arose before daybreak to meditate and then prepare a meal for themselves and any visitors. During the heat of the day they retired into the catacomb-like web of rooms and corridors, reading the ancient texts, meditating again—or so Spock assumed. Occasionally he saw one of the monks pass by the small indoor succulent garden where he and Sylan sat talking.

His father, he knew, stayed in their room working, keeping in touch with his office by comm. His mother stayed behind in Shi'Kahr, not out of choice but because her presence would be a distraction, one of many that Spock would have to overcome to heal.

In the afternoons Sylan took him to the meditation chamber, a large room ringed with multiple _asenoi_ set low in the wall like sconces. At first Spock was shy about the other monks, concerned that they would look at him askance—a mere boy—but soon he realized that they hardly noticed him, that their focus was so internal that little bothered them in the physical world.

It was an appealing notion.

In the evenings he was free to catch up on his schoolwork or walk around in the enclosed grounds—after being warned not to go outside the walls after dark. _Lematya _and wild _sehlats_ were sometimes spotted—and more frequently, heard—in the desert nearby.

"I have a _sehlat_ back home," Spock told Sylan when he cautioned him. "Father bought him for Sybok before I was born."

"You miss him?"

For a moment Spock wasn't sure if Sylan meant I-Chaya or Sybok. It didn't matter, really. He missed them both.

Admitting that, however, was shaming.

"If by miss you mean _want to be reunited with,_ then I do."

Often when he gave this kind of non-answer to his mother, she laughed. Or mock scolded him. Sylan, on the other hand, showed no emotion whatsoever.

"If your _sehlat_ is older than you are, then his life is close to its end. They rarely live longer then 8 or 9 years."

This was not new information to Spock. Indeed, he had gone down just this line of reasoning more than once, feeling each time a pang of sorrow when he ran his hands through I-Chaya's wooly fur.

Nevertheless, Sylan's words were painful.

"You will miss him when he dies," Sylan said. Spock's cheeks flushed and he nodded.

"When you meditate this afternoon, center your thoughts on your pet. Imagine losing him, and then balance any negative emotions with pleasant remembrances and gratitude that you have had him this long."

"Count your blessings," Spock blurted out. He looked down but not before he saw Sylan's eyes widen a fraction. "Something my mother tells me," Spock added.

He felt his face heat up with embarrassment, partly for speaking without being asked and partly because mentioning Amanda made him homesick.

And something else, too, drew color to his cheeks and made him squirm—his very real and often denied embarrassment that his mother was human.

And by extension, his embarrassment that he was, too.

He waited for Sylan to comment.

"You are fortunate that you are both Vulcan and human."

Of all the things Sylan could have said, this was so shocking that Spock did not know how to respond.

"Humans have chosen a different path than we have," Sylan continued. "They embrace their emotions but do not let them consume them. The danger for us is too great, of course. As a Vulcan, you must learn control. But as a human, you have more freedom. If you choose to feel your emotions—"

"But I do not choose them!"

"Not now," Sylan said, seemingly unbothered by Spock's outburst. "Right now you wish to feel nothing at all, to put aside your pain without addressing it. But if you do, it will continue to resurface. Only the high masters of Kolinahr are able to completely let go of ego enough to feel nothing. The rest of us must…struggle."

Spock looked up into Sylan's dark eyes.

"Father says that humans have less control than Vulcans, that I may never be able to master my emotions."

"True enough," Sylan said, and Spock felt a heaviness in the pit of his stomach. "But your human heritage also gives you the possibility of a richer life. As a Vulcan, I dare not indulge myself in missing my pet, in longing for my home. The feelings will overwhelm me if I do. But you. You can feel them without being carried away. That is why I said you are fortunate. Do as your mother says and count your blessings."

Suddenly Spock was very tired. Sylan's words were confusing. What did any of this have to do with what happened with Tavik anyway, with the reason he was here now at the monastery?

Sylan leaned forward on the stone bench where he sat and said, "Never let anyone tell you that you are _less_ because of who you are. You have no reason to feel shame."

"But I—"

"You heard the healer in Shi'Kahr tell your parents that you are a strong telepath."

How Sylan knew this Spock wasn't sure, but he nodded.

"It is because of this that you find control difficult. Not just because you are also human."

Again Spock started to protest, but he drew up short. Something in Sylan's words rang true. Like tumblers in a lock lining up, Spock's thoughts clicked into place.

For several weeks Spock had avoided remembering the assault, had drawn back from those memories like someone scalded. Tavik had been a trusted friend, an amusing companion.

_Balance the negative emotions with the pleasant memories_, Sylan had said, but the pleasant memories were weighed and found lacking.

Instead, Spock felt his heartbeat speed up when he thought about Tavik's pushing past his shields without permission, felt the anger of having his feelings and memories examined and judged like inanimate objects on a shelf.

_His declaration that his assault was justified because Spock was human, not Vulcan_—at the time Spock had not understood that Tavik was lying to excuse what he had done, that underneath his words he was jealous that Spock was more Vulcan in the way that mattered to Tavik, that Spock was such a strong telepath that his still unshuttered mind shone like a lightbulb in the fog.

He looked up at Sylan.

"Now you see," Sylan said. "As a strong Vulcan telepath, you cannot help but touch the minds of others. But as a human, you will find a way to manage."

For the next 19 days Spock met with Sylan daily, refining his meditation techniques, practicing his control. By the time he left the monastery, he had developed a mantra to keep him steady.

_I am human _and_ Vulcan,_ he intoned to himself. _I am not less. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts._

X X

The first thing Spock hears when he wakes is the steady thrum of machinery—or more specifically, the rhythm of his own heartbeat amplified by the biobed sensor, the quiet whoosh of an air exchanger, the static buzz of an overhead light with a faulty filament, the cicada-like whir of a handheld medical scanner.

He tries to lift his hands to cover his ears.

"Whoa!" a voice says—and Spock feels a pressure on his chest, as if something heavy is being placed there.

In the dim light of sickbay he can make out Dr. McCoy's face inches from his own.

"Where d'you think you're going?" the doctor says, his characteristic drawl belying the look of concern on his face.

"Why am I here?"

"You took a dive in the transporter room," Dr. McCoy says. "Banged your hard Vulcan head on the floor before anyone could stop you."

Spock tries to sit up and the doctor protests again.

"Be still," he scolds, "or I'll station a redshirt to stay here beside you and hold you down."

"I assure you," Spock says, struggling not to let his genuine annoyance show, "that I am capable of returning to duty. Please move out of the way."

"You can assure me all you want, but until I assure myself, you aren't going anywhere."

Spock starts to rise and the doctor adds, "Do I need to remind you that the chief medical officer has the final say in matters of health and well being on this ship? I didn't think so. If anyone knows the rules, it would be you."

The doctor is right, of course, and can pull rank if he chooses. Spock settles back and says, "Then at least contact the captain. I must communicate with him immediately about the alien pilot. I know—"

"There _is_ no alien pilot," Dr. McCoy says, his voice testy. "While you were taking a beauty rest we scanned that container we beamed aboard. There's nothing alive inside, just a small power source, probably for the external lights."

"When I touched it, the alien life form contacted me—"

"That metal box gave you a good old-fashioned electric shock, that's all. When Hansen picked it up, he must have activated it somehow, and then when you touched it, it zapped you."

"You are in error, Doctor. The container may appear to be empty, but it is not."

"Spock, you've had a concussion. It's normal to be confused afterwards. I'm telling you, your science people think it was supposed to carry something but the ship was destroyed before the pilot could put whatever it was inside."

Spock feels his pulse speeding up. He slows his breathing to keep his voice steady, given his frustration.

"While I trust your medical expertise, Doctor, your knowledge of xenotechnology and exobiology are not as extensive as my own—"

"Gentlemen."

Striding across sickbay is Captain Kirk.

"Oh, good, Jim, I'm glad you're here. Tell your first officer that he's to remain in bed until he's had time to recover from that shock and the concussion."

Before the captain can answer, Spock says, "Captain, it is imperative that I be allowed to resume my duties at once. The container we beamed aboard contains a sentient life form. We must determine what it needs."

"I thought the container was empty. Bones?"

"It is, Jim. I've already told Spock that."

"It may _appear_ to be empty, Captain," Spock says, "but before I lost consciousness, I was in contact with the creature—or creatures—who were on that ship."

"Creatures? You mean there's more than one? Then why don't our scans show them? Why does the container appear to be empty?"

"Unknown, Captain. If I can examine the container for myself, I may be able to answer that."

A slight narrowing of his eyes, a rapid blink, a sudden intake of breath—the characteristic mannerisms of the captain when he mulls something over and makes a decision. From the way he starts to turn toward the doctor, Spock knows he has convinced him.

McCoy reads the signs, too.

"Now just a minute," the doctor says quickly. "This man is not well. Furthermore, in my opinion, he is not thinking clearly—"

"Bones," Captain Kirk says, looking him squarely in the face, "Spock on a bad day still thinks more clearly than anyone else I know. I'm sorry, but if there is an alien life form on my ship, I want to know."

Spock watches the doctor's face run through several expressions and settle on one he recognizes—resignation.

"I'm going to be right behind you the whole time," McCoy says to Spock, sounding more like someone making a threat than promising aid.

Sitting up and sliding off the biobed, Spock is careful not to let the doctor see how much effort it takes to stand without wobbling. Taking a breath to gather his strength, he says, "The container?"

With a sigh, McCoy motions to the door leading to the lab on the right and Spock focuses on making his way across the floor.

The container, its lights still blinking, is propped up on a black lab table. On the monitor behind it are various schematics and diagrams, some showing the inner workings and wiring, and others detailing the composition of its elements.

Spock looks through the information quickly. The doctor was right. The container appears to be an empty hollow cylinder. Except for a small power signature coming from a fuel cell the size of a phaser battery, the container is inert.

Spock reaches out to touch it.

"Stop!" Dr. McCoy says in his ear. "That's what happened the last time!"

"Has anyone else touched the container?"

"Obviously. How could we have gotten it here otherwise?"

The doctor's tone is withering, but Spock dismisses it as typical of humans under stress.

"And no one else has been affected?"

"Maybe it just doesn't like Vulcans," the doctor says, his face pinched. "Maybe it's been programmed to keep you nosey types out."

Spock considers. Something in what the doctor says gives him pause.

Closing his eyes, he silences the distractions around him. First and closest is Dr. McCoy, his breath almost labored, the click as his lips part to say something—quite possibly to caution Spock again.

On his other side are the footsteps of the captain moving closer, the pendulum swish of his arms against the side of his uniform shirt.

The overhead air exchanger, a distant beeping of a sickbay monitor.

One by one Spock hears them and lets them go.

And only then can he hear it, like a hive of bees—a muted buzzing that grows louder as he lets his mind drift outward—

The buzzing morphs into a collection of disparate sounds that jar and jangle together. Dimly he feels someone's hand on his arm, hears someone calling to him. The doctor, most likely, but he ignores it and redoubles his effort to listen to the inward voices.

Despite what the scans show, someone is in the metal container—no, not someone, but multiple someones. They are calling out to him, he is certain, but their words elude him.

_I cannot_—he says into the void, and a wave of sorrow and desperation—his own and the others'—almost knocks him to his knees.

"Spock!"

The alien emotion wafts away and he is free. Opening his eyes, he sees the captain staring into his face.

"I am…unharmed, Captain. But I was correct. There are life forms here, and they will die if we do not hurry."

**A/N: I've been warned that long chapters don't get read. I hope that's not true! If you made it through, let me hear from you. Tell me whether the premise of this story is working, that each character's contribution is essential to the mission at hand. Your comments help me become a better writer!**


	3. Uhura

**Chapter Three: Uhura**

**Disclaimer: I do not profit from writing about these characters. Sadly.**

Even on a good day, Dr. McCoy can sound disagreeably crabby.

"Lieutenant," he barks over her comm earpiece, "report to sickbay immediately."

Nyota's heart speeds up. Today has _not_ been a good day. For the past three hours she's monitored the comm chatter between the transporter room, sickbay, engineering, and security. The captain, looking grim and tight-lipped, had divided his time between badgering Scotty for updates on the damaged engines and McCoy on updates about Spock in sickbay.

Then a few minutes ago the doctor had summoned the captain over the intercom.

"Your first officer's finally awake, Jim."

"Lieutenant," the captain said as he hurried into the lift, and she had gotten up smoothly from her station and slid into the captain's chair, the tension behind her eyes easing slightly.

That is, until now, when McCoy calls to her.

_Is anything wrong with Spock?_ The tension behind her eyes flares back up...and something else that she can't quite name.

_Nomad_. It had started with _Nomad._

Ever since Spock helped her recover her memories after Nomad's attack, Nyota has been unsettled, almost as if the multiple mind melds they shared tied a thread between the two of them, invisible and hardly noticed but still exerting a subtle connection. Even now she can't put into words what the experience had been like, how intensely intimate, how it has changed her.

The trip to sickbay takes two minutes but it feels much longer. As soon as she enters, she sees Christine Chapel, her brows knit in way that is alarming.

From the other room she hears the doctor, his voice raised.

"Now look here, Spock—"

A murmur as Spock makes some rejoinder, and then she sees them both, Spock standing at a lab table, his tricorder raised over what appears to be a meter-long metal box. The captain stands, arms akimbo, off to the side, too wary or wise to join the fight.

No one looks at her as she enters but she can tell from the cant of his head that Spock knows she is here.

"If you please, Lieutenant," he says, his eyes still on the tricorder in his hand. "I apologize for calling you from your normal duties, but the doctor is…concerned…that contacting the life forms within this container will result in my being physically harmed."

"You _were_ physically harmed before," Dr. McCoy blusters. "If you touch that container, it could happen again!"

"Not with precautions," Spock says. Then turning to her, he says, "I require your expertise, Lieutenant, and your physical presence."

Immediately Nyota knows what he intends to do. The security detail's report after Spock was injured indicated that at least two other members of the crew touched the container and were unhurt. Humans, apparently, are immune to the ill effects the container has on Vulcans.

Spock can meld with _her_, and _she_ can touch the container—insulating him, as it were, while allowing him to contact whatever is inside.

"Although I was able to sense the presence of the entities," Spock says, looking closely at her, "I was unable to decipher their message. You, however, are a more skillful communicator."

It is an unlooked for and unexpected compliment and Nyota feels her face flush furiously.

"I'm ready," she says.

"Jim," Dr. McCoy says, rounding on the captain, "you could end up losing both your science officer _and_ your communications officer. And for what? None of the scans show that the container has anything in it. You're putting your people at risk on a wild goose chase."

But Nyota can see that the captain has already made up his mind. He uncrosses his arms and closes the distance between them.

"We aren't out here to play it safe," the captain says. "Get started."

X X X

Nyota rarely made the same mistake twice.

An unsatisfactory quiz grade sent her scrambling to reorganize her study schedule in advanced calculus.

Hurting her best friend's feelings during an argument made her more careful about her choice of words in the future.

Hitting a wrong note during a school chorale performance meant extra practice before the next production.

But failing to place in the 100 meter dash—her best track and field event—during the Pan-Africa Invitational her sophomore year of high school was something different. She was used to finishing first in the regional meets, and sixth place in the Invitational was such a blow that she hinted to her mother that she was dropping out of the sport altogether.

"Do what you want," her mother said. "If you're convinced that you're really and truly beaten—that you can't improve at all—then you're wasting your time running."

If her mother had gotten angry, if her mother had acted personally disappointed, Nyota would have dug in her heels and turned in the letter of resignation she had already written to her coach. But her mother put the decision back on her.

And she didn't like to lose.

After the first practice after the Invitational, she waited until everyone else left before taking the coach aside to ask for extra help—a different warm-up routine, a suggestion for how to better pace herself?

"Those wouldn't hurt," her coach—a tall, loose-limbed woman who had twice represented Kenya in the Olympics—told her. "But you need someone who can help your head game. Your problem is that you can't stay focused; you are letting the crowd and the other competitors get to you."

Nyota opened her mouth to argue but her memory of the Invitational caught her up short. Her coach was right. On the starting block she'd heard one of the runners from United Sudan tell a teammate that the race would be a cakewalk.

"No one here is even running," she said, and Nyota flushed with anger. When the starting pistol went off, she stumbled slightly, enough to throw off her stride.

"I'll work on it," she said, but her coach shook her head.

"Not by yourself you can't," she said. "I think I know someone who might be willing to work with you."

"A personal trainer?"

Nyota scrunched up her face in distaste. She'd always despised those teammates who hired their own trainers—not that she objected to extra help, but because having a personal trainer went against her ethos of _team_.

At least to her. The coach crossed her arms and gave her a jaundiced look.

"Do you want to improve or not?"

"I do."

"Then accept the help you are offered with a modicum of grace."

Recognizing that she was being dismissed, Nyota nodded without another word.

A week went by, then two, and Nyota was beginning to think that her coach had abandoned the idea of a trainer. _Good._ If focus was her problem, she could fix that on her own.

In fact, running was the least of her problems. The other parts of her life were more chaotic. Next year she was expected to declare a career interest in school—not quite like a college major but close, something juniors did to prepare for life after graduation. Medicine still interested Nyota, and she enjoyed the life sciences more than anything else she had studied so far.

But when she tried to imagine herself as a surgeon or a general practitioner, something was off—that vision of herself didn't quite gel. She knew she would enjoy feeling competent and skillful, would love the interaction with people. Medicine seemed a logical choice. Except that it didn't_ feel_ right. Silly to base a career on a feeling, she knew, but she couldn't completely set her concern aside.

Her other worry was social, an on-again off-again relationship with a boy she'd known for years, first as a friend and then as a romantic interest. Again her logic and her feelings were at war with each other. Jason was handsome, charming, smart, attentive—everything she and her girlfriends talked about when they discussed the ideal boyfriend.

But as drawn to Jason as she was, as willing as she was to sacrifice time from her friends or her school work to be with him, she was also troubled by the skillful way he could manipulate other people to their disadvantage and for his own gain, by his lack of remorse when he did so. It spoke to a selfishness that bothered her, that kept her from being able to say _I love you_ and really mean it. It hindered her feelings, and to her surprise, she realized that when she weighed her feelings against her logic, her emotions won every time.

"I've found someone," her coach told her one day as she walked onto the track for practice. "He's agreed to meet you at the teashop on the corner after school tomorrow."

"I don't really think I need any help," Nyota said. "My times this week are back where they were before the Invitational—"

"I've already told him you are coming," her coach said, an edge to her tone that made Nyota wary.

She sighed. "Okay, I'll meet him and see if I think we can work together—"

"No," her coach said, the same hard edge to her voice. "You'll meet him and see if he will accept _you_. He may not find you worthy of his time."

Nyota was stung. Before she could reply, her coach continued.

"At least go with an open mind," she said. "You might be—surprised—at what you learn."

The teashop near the school was always crowded in the afternoons and evenings, mostly with students but also with people who worked in nearby businesses. Most were humans who lived in Nairobi, but a few were off-worlders whose companies had invested in the thriving technical and mining companies. Andorians and Tellarites, for instance, were sometimes there, though Nyota had never spoken to any.

As she walked through the front door, she glanced down again at the slip of paper in her hand. _Shivak_. Nyota had been unable to find any reference to a runner named Shivak, nor any account of a coach or trainer by that name.

She stood for a moment as a group of people passed around her, cups in their hands, and looked around the room. Suddenly she felt foolish for letting her wounded vanity keep her from asking her coach for more information—like how to identify this trainer.

Slowly she made her way to the line of people ordering tea at the counter, all the while keeping her gaze darting around the room.

_Nothing._ She caught no meaningful looks from any of the seated patrons, saw no one stand up and start in her direction. Maybe this Shivak wouldn't show up after all and she'd go back to her coach tomorrow and say, "Well, I tried."

"Mandorian tea," she told the worker behind the counter, but a voice behind her said, "I have already ordered a pot for us to share. Please follow me."

Turning on her heel, she saw the back of a man in a long hooded cloak. Giving the counter worker an apologetic look, she said, "Never mind," and hurried after the retreating man.

He made his way through the crowd to a small table in the far corner, a ceramic pot of tea and two handleless mugs already there. As he unfastened his cloak and folded it over the back of his chair, Nyota almost stumbled to a stop. The man was a Vulcan.

She had never met a Vulcan in person, but like everyone else, she recognized the traditional haircut, the pointed ears and upswept brows. His skin was a shade darker than her own, his hair so black that in the dim light it had blue and purple highlights.

"Oh!" she said, and then struggling to recover her composure, she added, "Mr. Shivak? I'm Nyota Uhura. Coach Umbizi sent me."

She wanted to bite her tongue. Of course he knew who she was, who had sent her. Sitting quickly in her chair, she willed herself to shut up.

Shivak said nothing but inclined his head a fraction, keeping his preternaturally black eyes on hers. Nyota felt herself shiver.

On the other side of the table Shivak settled in his chair and sat impassively, as still as a block, his dark gray tunic woven from something that fit his form like silk or fine wool. Nyota kept stealing glances at his face, trying to guess his age. Impossible to know, really. She had no idea how Vulcans looked when they were young, much less how they changed as they aged.

Shivak poured tea and she cupped her hands around her mug and took a sip.

"Um, good," she said, lifting her mug for emphasis. "Thank you. Lucky for me you chose my favorite tea."

Something flickered across Shivak's expression.

"Luck, Ms. Uhura," he said, his low voice carrying underneath the ambient noise of the teashop, "is a human concept often used to make spurious claims of causality. It was not luck but logic that led me to choose the tea."

If Nyota felt intimidated by Shivak's cool demeanor and unfamiliar expression earlier, she rose to the bait of an argument now.

"There are at least 20 different teas listed on the marquee," she said, her chin lifted in challenge. "Yet you chose my favorite. That had to be luck."

"There are 23 varieties listed on the marquee," Shivak corrected her, pointing to the marquee over the counter. "All of them written in different colors of chalk."

Nyota nodded, though until now she hadn't noticed that the marquee was not the usual digital sign but a deliberately old-fashioned quaint slate board.

"Whoever writes the varieties of the day erases the previous selections, though imperfectly, leaving a faint chalk residue on the board."

Again Nyota nodded.

"If you look closely, you can see that the only tea which has not been erased—which is written on the black slate with no residue behind it—is Mandorian tea. From the time it was first written on the board, it has not been erased, meaning it is never off the menu. Clearly it is a customer favorite that is offered every day. Since it is a popular selection, the odds were also high that you prefer it."

Nyota crossed her arms and grinned.

"Sherlock Holmes," she said, and though Shivak did not return her smile, she had the distinct impression that he found her comment amusing. "That was amazing."

"Not at all," he said. "It is simply a matter of being observant and logical—qualities that can help you improve your performance as a runner."

Nyota raised one skeptical eyebrow and took a sip of her tea.

"Is that what you're going to teach me?"

"It is what you are going to teach yourself," Shivak said. "If I choose to work with you."

His words caught her off guard and she swallowed too large and choked, briefly, her eyes watering.

"Sorry!" she stuttered, half expecting him to reassure her or to ask if she was okay. Shivak said nothing.

When she could talk again she said, "What are you doing here?"

At that Shivak's eyebrows shot up.

"Having tea, talking to you."

"No," Nyota said, laughing, "I mean, what are you doing on Earth? You're a Vulcan."

"Your powers of observation are already formidable," Shivak said, an unmistakable note of irony in his voice. "I am on Earth because I was born here. My parents run a mining cooperative in Kaloleni."

Nyota was so startled that she didn't know what to say. Her embarrassment was intense. How provincial she was, how uninformed! Her cheeks were hot and she covered them with her hands.

"I didn't know! I've never seen Vulcans here in Nairobi. I thought—I thought—I mean, I didn't know Vulcans owned businesses. I always thought you were scientists—"

Shivak's look was flat, inscrutable. Nyota ground to a halt.

"I'm sorry," she said at last, simply. "I shouldn't have assumed."

For a moment longer Shivak sat across the table, regarding her. Then he said, "Indeed. I have decided to accept you as a student after all, Ms. Uhura."

He stood up to leave and Nyota hopped up quickly, calling after him.

"Wait!" she said. "When do we start?"

"We already have," Shivak said. "Today was your first lesson."

After that they fell into a pattern of meeting before track practice two or three times a week at school. Usually Shivak came dressed in loose pants and a short tunic and he joined her in her warm-ups. At first she found his presence awkward, the attention from her teammates unwelcome.

"Your Vulcan's waiting for you," Marisa, one of her teammates, said in the locker room, and Nyota hotly retorted, "He's not _my_ Vulcan. Shivak is a person, and no one _owns _him."

As a running partner Shivak pushed her. No matter how fast or hard she ran, she had the unshakable conviction that Shivak was loping at half-speed beside her, like someone pulling his punches, his breathing not even labored. She made a game of trying to go fast enough to force him to visibly exert himself but she never could.

Instead, as he ran alongside he talked to her in a conversational tone, at first giving her suggestions about how to pump her arms or when to lengthen her stride, but also telling her a little about himself, how until recently he had been studying at the Vulcan Science Academy back on Vulcan, that he had only returned to Earth when his father needed surgery.

"Is he all right now?" Nyota said, breathing hard as they made their way up one of the many hills on the regular route they ran.

"He is still recovering," Shivak said, "but I anticipate that he will be able to resume his duties at the company within a few months. Then I can return to the Academy to continue my studies."

"Oh!" Nyota said, surprised by the idea that he was leaving soon. "What are you studying?"

Shivak had been running a few feet ahead of her and he fell back until they were side by side.

"My first degree was in geological engineering, for obvious reasons," he said. "At some point in the future I will need that information to help run the mining cooperative. Until then, however, I am free to pursue my true interest—the history of sentient colonization in the Beta Quadrant."

Again Nyota felt a wave of surprise. Such a topic was too broad, too comprehensive to imagine.

"How long until you finish that degree?" she asked, and Shivak gave a distinctly human shrug.

"Uncertain," he said. "I have already committed 37 Earth years to it—"

"37 years! How old _are_ you!"

Too late Nyota realized how overly-familiar her question was, how borderline rude. Shivak, however, did not seem to notice.

"66 years, nine months, four days, and 42 minutes."

Despite being winded from the uphill climb, she laughed.

"Are you absolutely _sure_," she said, and when Shivak said, "And 39 seconds," she laughed again.

After each warm-up run Nyota practiced her sprints with the team, Coach Umbizi calling directions while Shivak sat in the stands. Later she would join him there while he critiqued her performance—not on her speed or delivery but on her focus.

"Marisa spoke to you before the set up and you ran your worst time this week. You dislike her?"

"She's annoying," Nyota said, not wanting to admit the intensity of her negative feelings. Such an admission would sound petty and make her feel vulnerable, as if she was a victim somehow.

As if he could read her mind, Shivak said, "Why do you grant _another_ the power to dictate your emotions? You need to reclaim that control."

At one time Nyota would have argued with him but now she said in a quiet voice, "I know. But I can't."

At the next practice when she joined Shivak after the sprints he pointed to a rock on the seat between them.

"Any object can aid in meditation," he said. "Most Vulcans use a flame for concentration, but I prefer a stone—perhaps because stones are such an important part of my family's life. Look at this one and tell me what you see."

Nyota peered at the rock carefully. The size and shape of a Meyer lemon or Key lime, it was dark gray and smooth. Boring, really. Within a few seconds, she had seen all there was to see. She told Shivak so.

"You see but you do not observe," he said. "Look again."

She did. It was still a small gray rock.

"I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be looking for."

"Do you see the reflection of the passing clouds on the small flat patch facing the sky? Did you notice the vein of copper running along the longer axis? What about the space the rock covers? The place beneath it? In your imagination, can you picture the metal bleacher below the rock? Or have you considered your own proximity to it? How your hand is 15 centimeters away from it if you needed to pick it up? Have you calculated its weight or thought about what it would feel like in your palm, the heft of it, the coolness of its surface? Or what you could turn it into? A weapon? A carved image? An ornamental pendant? A small bowl?"

As he talked Nyota felt annoyed, then embarrassed, then humbled.

"I didn't see any of that," she confessed.

"Take it," Shivak said, and Nyota blinked. "The rock, take it. Use it as your focal point as you learn _kohl-tor,_ the Vulcan way of meditation. Start learning how to see."

The first time she tried to meditate alone with the rock she felt silly. Sitting crossed legged on her bed with the rock on her pillow, she stared and tried to empty her mind of everything except the rock, the way Shivak had told her. The mattress was soft and she was tired and the rock was still just a rock. In a few minutes she stretched out and fell asleep.

The second time she had more luck. She placed the rock on the floor and positioned herself beside it. Down the hall she could hear her mother starting dinner. Nyota let herself hear the noise—the scrape of a pan on the cooker surface, the door of the cooler being opened, the shuffle of her mother's footfalls—and she consciously let the sounds go, turned them into background noise that she no longer considered.

Then she did the same thing to her hunger, acknowledging it and setting it aside. She thought about a reading assignment that was due tomorrow in her Standard class, remembered a note she needed to send to her aunt. Those thoughts, too, she put away, until she had looked more carefully at the rock.

As her worries drifted away, Nyota felt her body relax, her heartbeat slowing, her fingers and hands and arms and shoulders growing cool and then chilly, until with a little shake, she realized that she had been sitting for thirty minutes without moving. Slowly she unfolded herself and stood up, completely refreshed.

"I think I'm getting the hang of it!" she told Shivak the next time they met. He said nothing but during her sprint practice, instead of sitting in the bleachers, he squatted near the starting blocks.

"What are you doing?" she asked, uneasy, but Shivak said, "I am pleased that meditation is proving beneficial."

"Ready!" Coach Umbizi shouted, and Nyota crouched low, her foot on the block.

"The humidity today makes running a particular challenge," Shivak said, and Nyota darted an angry glance in his direction. When the starting pistol went off she was a full second behind her teammates in reacting.

"Don't talk to me when I'm getting ready!" she scolded at the end of the sprint. "You threw me off!"

"Use what you have learned in _kohl-tor_," Shivak said. "Narrow your focus to your task at hand, the way you narrow your focus on your rock."

"But I'm not meditating right now! I'm getting ready to run!"

"_Rubah gehali tor-bosh t'ek'nam_."

"If that's an apology—"

"_Change is the essential process of all existence_. Be prepared for it, Ms. Uhura. Welcome it. No matter what happens, if you carry the rock in your mind, you will be ready."

From then on at every practice Shivak sat on the sidelines and called out to her as she prepared to sprint. She went through a series of emotions—anger, frustration, despair—partly at him but gradually with herself for letting his words bobble her concentration.

_The rock_, she said to herself as a mantra. _Think of the rock._

Before long she could hear Shivak's deliberate distractions without processing the meaning of his words, and from there it was a simple matter not to hear his words at all, to consign them to the same background noise as the singing of birds, the wind in the trees, an occasional flitter passing overhead.

Her running times continued to improve. By the time Shivak told her that he had booked his flight back to Vulcan, she was the favorite in the upcoming All-Kenya Open.

"I forgot you had to leave!" she said, disturbed by how sad she felt. "But that's good, isn't it? I mean, your father must be well."

"Well enough to resume his duties," Shivak said. "And I am eager to return to Vulcan."

"You must miss it."

"I find pleasure in my work there," he said. "And my son's _kahs-wan_ is imminent. My wife will be less anxious if I am with her when he undergoes the trial."

That Shivak had a wife and son was astonishing—but that she had never bothered to ask him was even more so. Once again Nyota was disappointed in herself, in how her assumptions had gotten in the way of her understanding.

For the past two months she had spent hours talking to Shivak without learning such elemental information—an indictment of her communication skills.

Nyota didn't want to make the same mistake twice.

She spent their last conversation asking Shivak about his family, about what his son was facing with his _kahs-wan_. It sounded dreadful—sending a young child into a life-threatening situation in the desert, and for what?

"It is difficult to explain," Shivak said. "The only words I know that capture the concepts are in _Vuhlkansu_. Anything I try to say in Standard is…incomplete."

She heard from him twice after he returned to Vulcan, once a short note that said simply, "Son successful. Studies resumed."

The second time was a year later after she sent him a note to let him know that she came in second in the 100 meter dash in the Pan-Africa Invitational.

_I didn't win_, she wrote, _but my time was a personal best._

Two days later he wrote back.

_You didn't lose._

Her senior year she added _Vuhlkansu_ to her course of study, to the bafflement of her friends and against her guidance adviser's recommendation.

"You'd do better to add another science instead," her adviser said. "You'll never use the Vulcan language as a doctor."

But Nyota was undeterred. Later when she applied to Starfleet Academy instead of medical school, the admissions committee noted that although her physical accomplishments were impressive, it was her familiarity with the Vulcan language that made her application rise to the top and guaranteed her acceptance.

X X X

Despite knowing that several other people have touched the duranium container safely, Nyota feels her palm flush as she slips her fingers across the top.

Nothing—just chilly, smooth metal.

"Lieutenant?"

"I'm okay, Dr. McCoy."

She looks up at Spock, granting him a kind of permission. He tilts his head a fraction in response.

At one time the idea of a mind meld would have made her uneasy, would have made her brace herself, wary of an intrusion. Now she closes her eyes and feels Spock's warm fingers brush her face.

Vertigo sweeps over her as sickbay disappears. Suddenly he is in her mind like a shadow in a corner.

The landscape around them swirls and moves like a kaleidoscope; glimpses of her home, the Academy grounds, an outcrop of red rocks, a shadowed hall—a mix of places important to both of them.

_Here_, Spock says, and the whirling stops, the scene coming into focus slowly.

Looking around, Nyota sees a flagstone porch bounded by a low stone wall. Under a pink and orange sky, oddly stacked mountains are sketched in the distance like slabs of fallen stones.

_Home?_ Nyota asks.

_Home,_ Spock agrees.

Before her on the porch are several chairs woven from thick plant fibers, a low round table between them. Somewhere nearby a wind chime jangles in random bursts. Stepping to the edge of the porch, she surveys the sand and scrub brush below. The soughing of the wind, the distant call of a bird circling in an updraft—she hears these.

_No one is here,_ she says.

_Are you certain?_

She senses Spock's disappointment and she slows her breathing, standing as still as she can.

And then she hears it, a silvery noise like new leaves rustling before a storm.

_They are looking for you,_ she says, not sure how she know this. _Your mind is a beacon for them._

_Help me reach out to them,_ he says, and in the imagined world of the meld she closes her eyes and stands on her tiptoes, her arms lifted.

_Here we are,_ she calls.

A wave of emotion rocks her on her heels. The alien life forms, surprised at finding her here, relieved to have found their way back, confused by the noises she makes.

_Words! These noises are words!_ she says, but as another wash of despair floods her, she turns to Spock. _They don't understand language, _she says_. It's impossible to communicate with them. I can't-_

_If not you, then who?_

A sound like a million bees rises and falls around her, and the Vulcan landscape is replaced by a velvet sky spangled with unfamiliar constellations. Under her feet is an alien world of glowing crystal sand and sharply scented air.

_Your home?_ she says into the void.

Instead of words, she feels a paradoxical rush of longing and contentment.

_You miss your home?_ she asks, hesitant, but the only reply is the same voiceless rustling.

Her frustration threatens to overwhelm her.

She doesn't like to lose. And she doesn't make the same mistake twice.

_Remember the rock._

Redoubling her focus, she begins to distinguish separate notes among the cacophony of sounds, teases them apart like untangling a knot. Not a single life form but many; a city, a state, a nation of beings.

_Where are you? _she calls, and the image of the alien world wobbles and morphs into a picture of the energy ribbon that destroyed their small ship.

_Fascinating_, she hears Spock say.

And just like that she is back in sickbay, her brow sweaty, Spock standing so close to her that she can feel his breath on her cheek.

"Lieutenant?"

"I'm okay, sir," she says, not at all sure that she is.

Spock waits a beat and then steps back, turning toward the captain and Dr. McCoy.

"You were not wrong, doctor," Spock says. "The container did appear empty when you scanned it."

"I told you so."

"The entities that inhabit it are a group mind, a trans-dimensional collective. When they travel in this universe, they require a containment device like this one. When their ship was destroyed by the gravimetric ribbon, some were trapped in the_ nexus _bet_w_een two realities."

"But some of them weren't? They are still able to move?"

"Yes, Captain. That's why when Dr. McCoy scanned this device, he picked up no life forms. They have been traveling between here and the nexus, trying to convince the others to return with them."

"Convince them? You said they were trapped, that they can't return."

"Captain," Nyota says abruptly before the faint impression from her last contact completely fades. "The ones in the nexus don't want to leave. They could if they wanted to."

The captain is an open book. His eyebrows fly up and he uncrosses his arms.

"Then what's the problem?"

"The collective cannot survive with part of itself missing," Spock says.

"Then they have to convince their...brethren...to rejoin them," the captain says with some asperity. Nyota can see that as far as he is concerned, the issue is settled. "We can't force them to do anything. If some of them want to stay in the nexus, that's not our problem."

"Actually," Spock says slowly, "it is. Their connection with each other is causing a rift between the universes, like a rubber band stretched through a hole in a piece of paper. It is, in effect, warping the very fabric of the time-space continuum. If they do not gather on one side or the other, they jeopardize the integrity of both."

From the center of the room Dr. McCoy makes a loud huff.

"Meaning what, exactly?"

Like someone in a dream, Nyota sees Spock in slow motion sorting out how to respond. Sees the captain squaring his shoulders, sees Christine hovering in the background, almost fidgety.

And taking a breath, she freights her next words with the same sense of urgency the entities pressed upon her during the last moments of the meld.

"Meaning the end of everything."

**A/N: Thanks so much for taking the time to read and leave reviews. I appreciate you more than you can know!**

**This chapter makes reference to "The Changelings," the story about Nyota's recovery after Nomad's attack. If you haven't read it and love TOS, take a look. It's listed in my profile.**


	4. Scotty

**Chapter Four: Scotty**

**Disclaimer: No money made here. Drats.**

From across engineering, Scotty hears the argument begin.

"Jim," Dr. McCoy says, "you're going to have to back off. Badgering your people isn't going to increase their efficiency. They're already falling-down tired."

"Thank you, Doctor," the captain says tersely, his tone suggesting he is not at all grateful for the doctor's opinion. Both men are obviously irritated with each other—but then who isn't feeling tired and irritated?

Ever since the _Enterprise_ ran into the energy nexus, multiple systems have needed repairs, including the warp drive that is still inoperative. Already a tug is on the way to tow them to Spacedock for the repairs that will take weeks, if Scotty's preliminary assessment is accurate.

The engineering crew has worked time and a half ever since, cataloging the damage and effecting what repairs they could to the other systems. The air-exchanger, for instance, has been restored—making the hot, sweaty work in engineering more bearable.

Looking up as the captain and Dr. McCoy come abreast, Scotty braces for what he assumes is coming.

"Report," the captain says, and Scotty frowns and says, "Progress is slow, Captain, but we've gotten a few more things repaired. The air-handler is back—"

"What about warp drive?"

"I cannae do much about that out here," Scotty says, tamping down his impatience. _Hasn't he already told the captain this? Twice?_ "We don't have all the equipment we need to recharge the power connections."

"That's not good enough."

The captain's mouth is set in a thin, straight line. At his side, the doctor reacts.

"Jim—"

"It's critical, Scotty! I don't want to hear what you can't do. When I tell you that I need warp, I expect you to deliver. Is that clear?"

"Aye, Captain."

"Jim—"

"What?" the captain barks. The doctor's expression goes hard.

"You're pushing too hard. Scotty's doing everything he can."

"He has to do better," the captain says, turning on his heel and walking out. For a moment McCoy lingers behind.

"He's just stressed, Scotty," the doctor says. "He knows you always give your best."

As the doctor turns to follow the captain out, Scotty shakes his head.

"This time I don't think my best will be good enough."

X X X

Montgomery Scott liked to say that his family had been shipbuilders back when ships were still built in Aberdeen two centuries ago. That may have been true.

Or not. The last three generations of Scotts had lived near the Dee River and made their living working in the family shipping transport industry. Before that, their history was a blank, though when it suited his purposes, Scotty had been known to tell a tale or two about courageous ancestors who crafted their own ships and then sailed from the harbor looking for lucrative fishing hauls.

After he graduated from university—his useless degree in astrophysical engineering raising his brothers' eyebrows and his father's ire—he dutifully joined the family business, starting as a lowly shipping clerk.

The company owned actual ocean-going vessels as well as the more conventional global hovercrafts, most which transported goods but a few which also carried passengers. Scotty's days were spent as a redundant fail-safe, going behind the scheduler looking for conflicts in shipping times and making sure the logs were kept up to date.

He had expected the work to be humdrum, but his boredom was stupefying. He joked with his friends that his job was nothing more than a sinecure, that no one would even miss him if he suddenly disappeared—and he wasn't that far wrong.

Still, Scotty accepted his work as something akin to destiny. He'd grown up playing with his brothers in the company's large riverside warehouses, climbing in the grounded hovercars and occasionally convincing one of the commercial pilots to take them for a spin. Now his two brothers were midlevel managers in the company and Scotty expected to put in his time before moving up, too.

Which would have happened if Alistair McFadden hadn't told him about the cargo ship for sale.

Like Scotty, Alistair was Aberdeen born and bred, a graduate of the University of Aberbeen where the two of them had met. Also like Scotty, Alistair worked in a family-owned company, a loan agency that occasionally found itself in possession of unusual collateral when a business went under.

One night over a pint at the local pub where Scotty watched football on the vids, Alistair told him about a small cargo ship the loan company had recently acquired.

"If you bought it, you'd be able to expand your company's shipping to the Mars colony or even to the ring settlements," he said. The idea of expanding the business didn't excite Scotty, but the idea of traveling off Earth did. He decided to suggest it to his father.

"If we can't transport off-planet," he told his father one evening as they sat in their sitting room eating Thai takeout from paper cartons, "we are going to fall behind. Now that Starfleet has expanded their bases at the edge of the Beta Quadrant, traffic is going to explode."

His father said nothing but gave him a skeptical glance. Scotty tried again.

"There's a niche opening up soon," he argued. "If we don't fill it, someone else will."

"Too risky," his father said at last, and Scotty put his food carton down in surprise.

"It's riskier not jumping ahead of the curve. If we wait, the routes will already be claimed and we'll have a harder time competing—"

"Not the business end of it," his father said dismissively. "The whole going into space part of it. I don't like it."

Scotty felt his mouth fall open.

"You don't like space travel? Why ever not?"

"It's not safe, that's why. Just last week there was that lunar barge lost when the engine went critical. Twelve passengers died right there."

Scotty shook his head slowly.

"You're joking, right? How many flitters and hovercars took a tumble last week? You know why you don't know? Because it's such an ordinary occurrence that it doesn't make the news anymore. But a lunar barge goes down once every ten years and that's what people note. That's what's called risk bias. We think that rare events—a lunar barge being lost—is a bigger threat because it makes the news, when we hop in our flitters and fly into danger every day."

His father's brow was furrowed and his eyes narrowed—signs that he'd made up his mind and talking to him further would be a waste of energy.

When Scotty brought up buying the cargo shuttle to his brothers, they were also dismissive at first.

"It's risky, all right," his brother Ian said. "And expensive. Hiring maintenance crew who know how to work on shuttles—"

"Look at me," Scotty said, tapping his chest in an almost comical way. "Did you forget that I'm an engineer? That I spent several years at university crawling around in shuttle engines? That my senior project was designing and building a prototype engine that can power up or down depending on whether your ship is flying through deep space or in some murky methane atmosphere? I'll be the maintenance crew until we're up and running."

His enthusiasm would have been enough to sway Ian, but his father had the final say.

"We're sticking with what we know," he said, and Scotty chafed in disappointment and frustration.

"Why don't you raise the money and buy it yourself?" Alistair said one night halfway through his second pint at the pub. At first Scotty just leered over his own glass, wiping a mustache of foam off his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Are you daft?"

"Listen," Alistair said, leaning forward and lowering his voice like a conspirator, "I know you don't like working at the shipping company, and I've been looking for a long time for something else to do besides the loan business. We could raise the capital we need to get going."

The idea was more appealing the more Scotty thought about it. To travel in space, something that had never seemed possible! To be his own boss, to make the decisions for his own business—and perhaps even to make some money doing it. By the end of the evening, he and Alistair had sketched out a business plan and listed potential investors.

At the end of six months they were still short of the capital needed to buy the cargo ship, despite touching all his friends and most of his family. Alistair, too, was tapped out of contacts.

And then to Scotty's surprise, his father rescued him, giving him the difference between what he had already raised and what he still needed to get properly set up.

"Don't thank me," his father said gruffly when he handed him the credit chit. "It's your inheritance early, the same amount your brothers will get one day. Don't expect anything more."

The cargo shuttle was nothing flashy to look at, but Scotty was smitten the first time he took it out of orbit for a test run. Two large cargo bays, crew quarters for six, even a common mess room large enough for everyone to gather in one place—he liked everything.

His deep and abiding love, however, he reserved for the engine itself—a Totomeir 321 with a dilithium feed large enough for a larger ship.

"My bonny lass," he said, running his hand along the duranium casing, letting his palm rest over the vibrating heartbeat.

Alistair agreed to be the public face of the company—navigating the government red tape and registering for the necessary licenses, managing the one room office and contacting potential clients. Once Alistair had drummed up enough business for a first run, Scotty hired a pilot and a co-pilot—twin sisters named Irma and Elsa Gonzales—and declared himself chief engineer. The first trip to Starbase 11 and back took four days, an uneventful delivery for a construction company, but by the time they docked again on Earth, Scotty knew he could never work inside a building again.

For the first year the company barely broke even. Out of necessity, Scotty became a master of jury-rigging spare parts in a pinch, more than once cobbling together bits and pieces of unrelated equipment to fashion something essential to getting around safely in space. He became such a regular at junk yards that the owners starting saving their weirdest, least recognizable cast-offs for him to look over.

And then disaster struck.

The cargo ship had just made a delivery to Deneva and was heading home when Irma called him to the bridge.

"This keeps fluctuating off the scale," she said, tapping the ion particle indicator. "I don't see anything on the screen, but something is setting off the sensor."

"Could be a malfunction in the sensor itself," Scotty said, but Irma shook her head.

"I don't think so. Twice when the ion levels ranged high, the gravimetric indicator also flashed on. One sensor could malfunction, maybe. But two unrelated ones? Something's out there tripping the load."

She gave him a meaningful look.

"Ah, bollocks," he said. "Okay, I'll go out and check it out."

Of all the tasks on the ship, the one Scotty liked least was suiting up and doing an EVA. Not that he minded floating at the end of a tether, hoping like hell a microasteroid didn't punch a hole in his suit.

What he minded was the suit itself. No matter how he tried to psyche himself up beforehand, he always felt a moment of panic when he squeezed his torso into a tight-fitting space suit and pulled a helmet over his head.

His claustrophobia manifested itself nowhere else. Without blinking an eye he could squirm into a small dark workspace within the ship, even crawling inside the engine itself, with no ill effects.

But the space suit! With a sigh he opened the storage cabinet and pulled it out.

Tugging it on quickly, he opened the bulkhead leading to the airlock and sealed himself in. Taking two deep breaths, he lowered his helmet onto the collar rim and twisted until he heard it snap securely in place.

As he always did when he went EVA, he took a moment to appreciate the beauty of his ship with the spangled sky in the background.

"Okay?" Irma called over his headset, a slight note of worry in her voice. She knew about his phobia, about how hard he worked to conceal it.

"Fine," he said tersely, giving her a _thumbs up_ in case she was keeping a visual on him.

The sensor panel on the ship was near the port access shaft, and Scotty used the suit jets to propel himself close enough to grab the hatch hold. With a few quick turns he unscrewed the panel cover and pinned it back.

His portable scanner showed nothing wrong. Lifting the ion particle sensor out of its cradle, he inspected it visually. Nothing wrong that he could see, either.

He repeated the same process for the gravimetric sensor.

Nothing.

"Sensors are working," he said, and he heard Irma say something to Elsa over the comm.

"You need to head back," Irma said suddenly. "Now!"

Before he had time to ask why, Scotty saw a flash of light in the corner of his eye. Turning, he could just make out what looked like an unfurling spool of silk in the distance.

An energy flux, obviously, though not like one he had ever seen before. Scotty felt his heartbeat speed up.

Snapping the sensor panel shut, he headed towards the air lock. The atmosphere around him grew brighter as the energy flux slithered closer, lighting up the shuttle until it almost glowed. The hair on the back of Scotty's neck rose.

His hand was on the air lock release when the energy flux hit, knocking him away from the ship and stretching his tether like an old-fashioned rubber band. Instinctively he lifted his hands for a moment to the side of his helmet, trying to stem the static that flooded his comm. Inside his air-controlled suit, Scotty began to be uncomfortably hot—_like an egg in boiling water_, he thought, frantically reeling himself hand over hand on the tether back towards the ship.

With a sickening pop he felt himself suddenly loose, the tether broken, the gulf between him and the ship widening at an alarming rate.

The heat and noise of the energy flux grew louder and he bobbed around like a cork on a wave. Closing his eyes as the light became painful, he began to hallucinate.

Or at least that's what he told himself later.

"You're here!" his grandmother said, and he opened his eyes and found himself in his grandmother's kitchen, a piece of pie on a plate on the table in front of him. "I've been waiting so long to see you again!"

"How—" he started, but his grandmother—long dead—smiled and put her finger to her lips to hush him.

"It doesn't matter," she said. "You're here now, so eat."

Looking down, he realized that he wasn't wearing the hated EVA suit but was dressed in casual clothes.

"I don't understand."

"You always were a curious boy," his grandmother said, running her fingers over his brow. "I knew you'd make something of yourself one day."

"Where am I?"

But his grandmother was already starting to fade, the kitchen replaced by the black sky.

He was alone. Adrift. The energy flux had rolled out of sight, spitting him out like unwanted flotsam; his ship was nowhere to be seen.

"Mayday!" he said, expecting to hear Irma's voice, but instead of static he heard nothing, as if his comm had been completely shorted out.

Although he was fairly certain that the homing device on his suit had also shorted out, he set the beacon anyway. Even if Irma and Elsa had trouble finding him, traffic in this shipping lane was fairly regular. Surely someone would come along and find him soon.

Except that no one did. For 36 hours he drifted in the dark, cold and miserably hungry, his oxygen meter dropping slowly. What had his father said about the perils of space travel? At the time Scotty had mocked him, too.

And then he saw it—a dot of light that seemed to expand slowly. _An approaching ship! _ His heart leapt up. If he could make sure that his homing beacon was working—

The beacon wasn't that powerful—with a signal designed to keep tabs on EVA workers who wouldn't travel far from their ships. Why hadn't he thought about boosting the signal before now? _I must be losing my mind, _he thought, unlatching the switch mounted on his arm panel and tugging out the thin wires connected to the beacon signal.

To the naked eye the wires looked fine, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. The ionized particle wave that had shorted out his comm could also have wrecked the beacon mechanism. With a jerk, he pulled one of the wires free and redirected it to the power source controlling the suit jets.

_A good way to electrocute myself_, he mused, wrapping the wire around the power lead.

Meanwhile the dot of light was growing more distinct. Definitely a ship, and definitely heading in his direction.

Being patient was the hardest part. By connecting the beacon to the jet power, when he turned on the suit jet, the beacon would squeal—hopefully louder and with greater range than normal. If the ship had an attentive pilot—or if it was large enough to have a communications officer—his signal might be heard.

For less than a second. Then the power source would fry the wire. The window of opportunity to make himself heard was incredibly small—hence he had to wait patiently until the approaching ship was close enough.

As the dot of light grew larger and larger, it split and refined itself into two and then four brilliant spots of light, white and blue and moving very quickly. Not a commercial freighter, then. Not even a private cruiser. A starship. Probably one of the Federation's making its way on a regular patrol of the starbases in this area, running on impulse power.

Sure enough, Scotty could soon make out the running lights along the nacelles and the saucer section.

As it loomed closer, he took a deep breath of his dwindling air and pressed the jet switch.

For a sickening moment nothing happened, and then the ship began almost imperceptibly to slow before finally stopping.

"Do you hear me?" Scotty said, more to comfort himself than out of any hope that his comm was working again.

More minutes passed and Scotty felt the first real tendrils of fear and despair. How easy it would be to assume the beacon signal was some sort of anomaly, to dismiss it as background noise. Unless the communications officer was careful, he'd be left here, his oxygen running out long before another ship came by.

And then he felt it—the telltale tingle of a transporter beam—and suddenly he was falling on his knees on the transporter pad of the _Yorktown_, Captain Christopher Pike coming through the door to quiz him personally.

"My ship," Scotty said as soon as a crewman unlatched his helmet and maneuvered it off. "Did you find my ship?"

He collapsed then and woke up later in sickbay.

"I'm glad you're awake," the young doctor said who attended him. "There's someone here who's been worried about you."

Scotty frowned and tried to focus on a figure coming into view. Irma, and behind her, Elsa.

"You're okay!" he said, relieved, and she nodded.

"We were in the escape pod," she said. "The _Yorktown_ found us after they found you."

"The escape pod? Then—"

Scotty didn't finish his sentence. The only reason Irma and Elsa would have been in the escape pod was if his ship had been too badly damaged to salvage. Irma flushed and leaned closer.

"We tried to save her, Scotty, but that storm, or whatever it was, burned out the dilithium crystals and sheared the aft propulsion unit off. We were leaking atmosphere so fast that the hull integrity was compromised."

She didn't have to say more. Scotty knew what had happened next—the ship had collapsed inward like a smashed cardboard box.

His business—dead. His inheritance—gone. Even with the insurance payoffs, he could never afford to replace the cargo shuttle.

But at least no one had been seriously hurt, he reminded himself.

Or he tried to. The image of his beloved Totomeir 321 brought a lump to his throat.

"She was a good lass," he said, his voice bobbing.

By the time the _Yorktown_ dropped him off at Starbase 37 to catch a ride back to Earth, he knew what he would do.

"You might be a little old for a new recruit," Captain Pike said, "but Starfleet's looking for talented people. My science officer says that the way you jimmied the beacon was genius-level thinking. If you're serious about joining, I'll put in a good word for you."

X X X

"You wanted to see me, sir?"

Scotty stands stiffly at the open door to Captain Kirk's quarters, trying not to let his annoyance show. The captain knows how busy he is in engineering—the warp engines completely offline, the impulse engines dodgy.

"Please," Kirk says, motioning for him to sit down. Scotty does so, reluctantly perching on the edge of his chair. If the captain notices his unease, however, he doesn't let on.

Instead, he walks to a wall cabinet and opens it, taking out a glass bottle.

Scotty perks up immediately.

"Is that what I think it is?" he says, already feeling a peculiar thirst in the back of his throat.

"I don't know," Kirk says, "unless you think this is twelve year old premium blend Scotch."

Scotty feels a contradiction of desire and despair. The only reason the captain pulls out the stopper like this is when he wants the impossible.

Which, of course, he does.

"You know the warp drive is a mess," Scotty says. "And once we _do_ get towed to Spacedock, we're looking at three weeks minimum to get back online. Tell me you aren't asking for warp drive anytime soon, Captain, and I'll gladly drink to your health."

The captain sets the bottle on the table between them.

"I need warp drive now, Scotty," he says. "That alien we beamed aboard is trapped—partly here and partly in that nexus that knocked the engines out. I don't know how—I'm not sure of all the details—but Mr. Spock says that if we can't get the alien back to the nexus, the fabric of space-time will unravel. Our universe, Scotty, will be destroyed."

For a moment Scotty doesn't move. The dilithium is drained. The leads are fused. Weeks of work to trace every burned out lead and replace it.

Unless, of course, he assigns everyone double shifts and Spock deploys all the astrophysicists temporarily to engineering. They've had sufficient training to be able to handle the spectrometers without blowing anything up.

And he could use volunteers from Security to clean up and fetch.

"Can you do it, Scotty?"

The captain's voice is one notch below outright wheedling. _The shameless manipulator._

With a sigh, he holds out his hand and the captain scoots the bottle of Scotch to him.

"I need a drink," Scotty says, standing up, the bottle in his hand, "but I'm going to wait until I know it won't be my last one."

**A/N: Thanks for letting me know what you think. I really appreciate the time and care you put into your reviews.**

**Scotty's time inside the Nexus was modeled after what Guinan and Kirk experience in TNG and ST: Generations. I hope I got the feel of that right!**


	5. Chekov

**Chapter Five: Chekov  
**

**Disclaimer: I didn't create these characters, but I did create their current misery.**

"The best thing you could do for me, laddie," Mr. Scott says, reaching past Pavel to the access panel in the bulkhead, "is to go back up to the bridge and keep the captain occupied and out of my hair."

Pavel Chekov takes a deep breath and sighs.

"The keptin sent me here to assist you," he says. "If I return to the bridge before the warp engines are online, he will say that I have failed."

"Unless you have an idea for how to rewire these fused leads, realign the dilithium crystals, and jump start the engine, you are in my way."

"Isn't there something I can do?"

"Hold this," Scotty says, putting his PADD in Pavel's hand while he uses a spanner to unlock the panel. Slipping his fingertips under the leading edge, he pulls and the panel swings out.

"See this," Scotty says, pointing to a greasy dark spot on one of the wire circuits. "That's what happened the last time we ran into that electrical beastie. All over the ship, these little disruptions are hiding in the wiring. The only way to find them all is to visually inspect the wiring. Do you know how much wiring is on this ship?"

"A lot?"

"Aye, a lot."

"What is this? A burn?"

Scotty gives a huff of frustration.

"Something about that…that…nexus between the universes shorted out these leads. Completely fried the connections. I have no idea why. All I know is that I'm having to run new wire to replace this useless stuff."

"Why can't you just replace the parts we need to get the warp engine online?"

Scotty frowns and throws up his hands in the air, the picture of aggrieved impatience.

"Ach, man, do ye even know what you're asking? It's like dominoes! This wire is connected to the air handler, which is connected to the life support temperature controls, which is connected to the inertial dampener, and so on and so on. You see what I mean now?"

A blue-shirted science officer walks up then and holds up another PADD for Scotty to look over.

"That's all you've got? A partial algorithm isn't going to do us any good if the containment field collapses when we try to go to warp. When you have something worth showing me, _then_ you can interrupt what I'm doing."

The officer, someone Pavel recognizes from his occasional work with Mr. Spock in the physics lab, blinks rapidly as Scotty talks.

"So?" Scotty says, frowning. "Go!"

The officer walks away rapidly.

"Flipping idiot," Scotty mutters under his breath. The overhead lights flicker suddenly and Pavel looks around as two engineers pause in their soldering of an exposed cable running along part of the nearest wall.

"Sorry, sir," one engineer says to Scotty who mutters something unintelligible as he slips his spanner back into his utility belt.

"See what I mean?" Scotty says. "Everything on the _Enterprise_ is connected. No system is truly free-standing. That fail-safe means there's always a way around a problem, but in a situation like this, it means the damage is pervasive. Now, like I said, you're in the way here. Best be heading back to the bridge."

He's right, of course. If at one time Pavel had entertained the idea of becoming an engineer, his course work at the Academy had quickly narrowed to the issues affecting navigation. Too bad this isn't something navigation can fix.

As he starts toward the door, Pavel glances around at the other repairs going on—open panels everywhere, sparks flying and the smell of ozone as wires are pulled and new ones soldered on. Even up high on the catwalk, engineers are dangling in work tethers, visually inspecting the wiring that runs along the interior struts.

Like walking through the center of a chess game, Pavel muses, thinking of the tri-dimensional chess board he keeps in his quarters.

Chess game. Tri-dimensional board. Of course! Swiveling around, he rushes back to where Scotty is berating yet another engineer.

"Mr. Scott! Mr. Scott!" he says, tapping Scotty on the shoulder. "I know how to fix it! I know how to get the engines back online!"

To his credit, Scotty doesn't call him an idiot to his face, though his expression suggests he might be thinking it.

"Well?" Scotty says, and Pavel hurries on.

"You could rig up relays between the systems that control the engine!"

"What do you mean?"

"Where the wires are damaged! Hook up a signal relay between the power source, the navigation controls, the dilithium fluctuator—all the essential things you need, bypassing everything else."

Scotty's frown is more thoughtful than dismissive, and Pavel feels his heart racing in excitement.

"Like a chess game, see? You can jump from one level to another using signal boosters at the critical relays. They don't have to be physically connected to communicate with each other."

"Aye," Scotty says slowly, "that might work. If we bleed off just enough power to jump from one system to the next, we might not even feel any disruption in the other areas of the ship."

It's a gamble, of course. If Scotty diverts too much power from the grid, life support or the artificial gravity might fail, with disastrous consequences. On the other hand, the captain was clear that they have to get the ship moving or the entire universe will be in danger. Worth a little risk, then.

Scotty's fist comes down like a hammer and pounds his shoulder.

"Well, laddie," he says, "I think you've finally earned your pay."

X X X

Pavel Chekov liked to say that he joined Starfleet because of a woman. At parties that always got a laugh, but he wasn't joking. It was true. If Irina Gulliulin hadn't enlisted, he'd be working at some engineering firm or teaching math in a boarding school in Novosibirsk.

The path to Starfleet really started when Pavel joined the chess club his junior year of secondary school, revisiting a game he had played as a child with the lackluster enthusiasm that comes from always beating his opponent, of having no real challenges to interest him. Irina was the first person who could—or who came close to being able to—out-think his moves. Like Pavel, she was an exceptional player. Unlike Pavel, she was an exceptional player because she worked at it, studying the chess masters and attending regular tutorials.

"If you worked as hard as I do," she scolded him, "you would be a grand master already."

Ducking behind a stack of books in the library carrel where they were hunkered down before exams, Pavel nuzzled Irina's neck and said, "I have better things to do with my time."

He'd met Irina his first year at secondary school, but until their junior year, she had ignored him. Or rather, he had simply been part of the background of her busy, popular life. Irina was the person everyone looked to when she walked in a room, was the instigator on numerous hilarious pranks, always had a smile or a joke. She was beautiful and carried herself the way some women seemed to, as if she was used to being obeyed, like a beloved benign dictator.

Which is why Pavel stuttered in her presence, why he never once tried to start a conversation when he found himself alone with her.

Not that that happened very often. Irina was surrounded by friends, even as she pushed her tray down the line in the cafeteria, kicked a soccer ball on the field, looked for a book in the library, traveled through the crowded halls from classroom to classroom. It was maddening.

Pavel developed a sixth sense about where she might be—could stop whatever he was doing and wonder where Irina was and could find her, more often than not, doing exactly what he had imagined. By the time she finally gave him serious notice, he had decided she was unattainable and had set his sights on lesser mortals with some success. One was a friend of hers, Tatiana Smolenski, a dark-eyed girl with an athletic build who wore her long hair in a single braid down her back. After several weeks of flirting and kissing behind the field hockey equipment shed, Tatiana caught Pavel walking another girl to class—an innocuous enough action, though Tatiana wasn't fooled. Such apparent courtliness with another girl was a betrayal of sorts, and she turned to her friends for comfort.

Irina rounded on Pavel like a fury.

Walking up to him in the crowded courtyard in front of the school, she declared, "Pavel Andreievich Chekov, you are a miserable human being."

He was flabbergasted. For months he had pined for her, had longed to hear her address him by name, and now he had. Instantly he was healed of his tendency to stutter in her presence, like someone touched by a faith healer.

"I _am_ miserable," he said, "because of you."

She gave him a withering glance and turned on her heel—but not before he saw something else flicker in her expression. Interest, or curiosity. She wasn't as offended or mystified as she pretended.

When she approached him a few weeks later, he didn't even bother to act surprised.

Sidling up beside him as he stood in line in the cafeteria, she said, "I'm looking for a physics study partner. Do you already have someone?"

"I have no one," he said, letting his words do double duty.

From then on they were together more than they were apart. Suddenly Pavel found himself in the swirl of a social life. Irina's friends became his friends. Irina's schedule became his schedule. Far from minding, he was usually content to follow in her wake.

When she started talking about joining the early enlistment program at Starfleet, at first he dismissed the idea as one of Irina's typical impulsive ideas, like her plan to travel the galaxy as a freighter hand after graduation, or her series of hobbies that she pursued intensely for short bursts before letting them drop off her radar.

"I'm serious this time," she assured him. "And you need to get serious, too. You'll be out of school before you know it."

Despite her appeals to go with her to hear a Starfleet recruitment lecture, Pavel begged off.

"At least you could do something worthwhile with your time," Irina said. "The language lab is open this afternoon."

Pavel felt a prickle of irritation at Irina's implied criticism. Sure, he was struggling in his Standard class, but he wouldn't need Standard to work in most Russian engineering firms.

He could sense her looking at him closely.

"One day you'll wish you knew the language," she said. Before he could respond, she hurried on. "If you're serious about entering the chess tournament next month, you ought to spend some time practicing. Sergei's always up for a game. Why don't you ask him?"

"Irina," he said, finally exasperated, "go to the lecture and stop worrying about how I'll spend my afternoon!"

Part of his annoyance was from knowing that she was right, that he needed to practice the damnable consonants that gave him so much trouble in his Standard class, that playing a game or two with his friend Sergei wouldn't hurt. Rather than do either, however, he curled up in one of the oversized chairs in the library and took a nap.

After the lecture, Irina talked of little other than Starfleet. As she started gathering the recommendations and taking the subject exams she needed to apply, Pavel's anxiety rose. She was really going to do this.

"You should think about it," she told him. "We could enlist together."

Some part of his brain was in denial, was waiting for her interest to flag. Was, in fact, hoping for her to forget the whole thing.

And then they went to London.

As the best players on the school team, both Irina and Pavel were selected as junior participants in the Federation Worlds Chess Championship. Along with their coach, they took public transport from Nizhny Novgorod and settled in a youth hostel near the large convention center near the Thames that hosted the tournament each year.

London was a wonder. Much larger and more populous than Nizhny Novgorod, it was never quiet. After the obligatory open-topped double-decker hover bus tour around the city, the coach turned them loose to explore on their own for the rest of the day while he met with the other tournament officials. The pubs, the museums, the boutique stores of Oxford Street—all were new and exciting for two young people who had never been far from home.

Pavel half expected the actual tournament to be something of a letdown, and in that he was pleasantly surprised. As soon as they walked into the convention center and made their way to the registration table, he counted more than a dozen off-worlders, including two Aenar from Andoria, a sightless species whose telepathic abilities were so pronounced that they were only allowed to compete against other telepathic races.

Well-known accomplished chess players, the Vulcans also had several representatives in the tournament. As Pavel and Irina made their way to their assigned seating near the front of the convention hall, Irina suddenly pointed to a tall Vulcan man in a Starfleet uniform.

"There," she said, catching Pavel's eye briefly. "That's one of the speakers from the lecture. He served on a starship and is doing a stint at the Academy."

"What's he doing here?"

"Commander Spock's a past champion and one of this year's judges. You ought to introduce yourself."

"Why?" Pavel said, mystified that Irina thought he should.

"Connections, silly," she told him, nudging him with her elbow. "He might put in a good word when you apply."

With a sigh, Pavel said, "We need to talk about that."

But before he could say more, an older man in a long green coat came to the mic and called the first players to the stage—and for the rest of the morning Pavel was too busy to worry about anything further in the future than his own scheduled match.

Both he and Irina made their way through the preliminary rounds easily. That afternoon they played in the next round—this time with Irina losing to a graduate student from the Indian sub-continent. Pavel, on the other hand, won his match in record time.

After an evening meal, the quarter-finalists were announced. Pavel wasn't the board leader, but he was close, high enough in the rankings to ensure a good position going into the final round the next morning.

At the youth hostel that night he listened with one ear to his coach's instructions. With the other ear he listened to London at night—the distant, steady roar of traffic punctuated by a passing siren, the whoosh of a private flitter, the deeper rumble of a tourist hover bus. The city felt so _alive_ that Pavel had trouble settling down in his narrow bed to sleep—as if the buildings and roads and even the river that snaked its way through them all were calling to him.

He slept badly and woke up tired, not enough to shake his confidence but enough to make him a little jittery.

Later he would attribute his odd mood for what happened next.

Walking to his designated seat near the stage, he looked up and saw the same Vulcan Irina had pointed out the day before, Commander Something-or-Other from Starfleet. When they made eye contact, Pavel felt a shiver start at the top of his head, almost causing him to stumble.

In the dim light of the conference hall the Commander looked like an illustration of a medieval demon—tall, spare, clad in charcoal gray, his eyes so dark that they seemed to look through Pavel, his ears and eyebrows upswept and alien.

_Introduce yourself_, Irina had said, but now that he was face to face with the Commander, Pavel was afflicted with the same tongue-tied muteness that used to bedevil his early encounters with her. He nodded instead and started to pass.

"Mr. Chekov," the Commander said, and Pavel stopped in his tracks. Then the Commander said something else that Pavel didn't understand—words strung together so quickly that their meaning was beyond them. He shrugged by way of apology.

With a raised eyebrow, the Commander motioned toward the small judges' table near the stage. Electronic scoresheets were stacked at one end. At the other, a tri-dimensional chessboard was set up, the pieces indicating a game in progress.

"You play this variation?"

_A question._ With a nod, Pavel said, "I play before."

In fact, he'd never played tri-dimensional chess against an opponent other than a computer. No one in the chess club wanted to learn, not even Irina, traditional chess garnering much more public interest. As far as Pavel knew, the International Chess Commission hadn't sanctioned any official tournaments for tri-dimensional chess, though he'd heard about some unofficial ones somewhere. Amsterdam? Brussels? He couldn't remember.

"Your match is not scheduled until 1130. Would you care to play?"

The Commander was speaking slowly and deliberately—for Pavel's benefit, obviously. He felt his ears heat up in embarrassment. _Damnable language_. Glancing about, he saw Irina already seated in the observer section, chatting comfortably with another woman.

Would the pleasure of playing a game of tri-dimensional chess outweigh the intense uneasiness he felt in the presence of the Vulcan Commander?

With a sigh, Pavel tried to form the words to turn down the invitation.

"Thank you," he said, and at once he realized his mistake. The Commander nodded and pulled out the chair for him before taking a step around to the other side of the table and sitting down.

As the Commander moved the pieces to reset the board, Pavel looked again to where Irina was sitting. This time she met his eye and smiled.

_She thinks I'm doing this to help my application_, he thought.

"Your move," the Commander said, and Pavel turned his focus to the board.

All at once his anxiety fell away, the way it always did when he was facing a chessboard, his fingers twitching slightly as he narrowed his gaze and let his mind drift several moves into the future. With tri-dimensional chess it wasn't enough to think horizontally. He had to also think vertically—requiring more concentration than usual.

Sketching a decisive gesture with his hand, he picked up a pawn and moved it one level. Hardly batting an eye, the Commander captured that piece and advanced his rook. In a few more moves the game was essentially over and Pavel conceded.

"Another?" the Commander asked. To answer, Pavel reset the board.

This time he lasted twice as long as before—three minutes, or maybe four.

"In my experience," the Commander said as Pavel finished, "the traditional strategy of sacrificing your weakest position is a mistake in tri-dimensional chess. Here the weak must be protected by the strong, not the other way around."

Pavel blinked and tilted his head. Had he heard the Commander right? If so, the game was far more complex than he had imagined, requiring him to rethink his tactics.

He lasted twelve minutes and lost fewer pieces in the next game.

"Sorry, time for match," he said, looking meaningfully toward the stage where the first competitors of the day were being seated. The Commander followed his gaze and then nodded once, a benediction of sorts. Pavel stood up, cursing his struggle with the language.

"Thank you," he said, giving an awkward bow from the waist, hoping he wasn't doing anything culturally offensive to Vulcans.

For days after he returned home after the championship—which he did not win—Pavel mulled over the experience, not just the excitement of London and the tournament, but the way the Commander had deftly steered him into a more successful game with a few well-chosen words. For the first time since Irina had become interested in enlisting in Starfleet, Pavel began to seriously consider doing the same.

To share his gifts, such as they were, with a team of gifted colleagues—the idea was suddenly very appealing. He started putting in more hours in the Standard lab, and when Irina suggested they spend afternoons studying for the entrance exams, he didn't resist—much.

When the time came to take the exams, Pavel was grateful that they had put the amount of time in that they had. The exams were so grueling that he literally stumbled out of the examination room, too tired to do anything other than sit in the cafeteria, a cup of cooling tea on the table. On the other side of the table, Irina laid her head on her crossed arms.

"Those were the worst six hours of my life," she mumbled, but he said nothing. Even the thought of trying to answer her was exhausting.

Two months later their acceptance letters came in the same post, and shortly after that, they flew together to San Francisco for orientation. One of their first tasks there—after picking up their uniforms and equipment and stowing them safely in their dorms—was to register for classes and decide on a tentative major. Irina had no hesitation, declaring her interest in xenobiology. Pavel, on the other hand, wavered.

"Your aptitude scores suggest the engineering track," his counselor said as they sat in an office working on his schedule. For a long time he had imagined himself as an engineer—or even as a mathematics instructor—but something about the idea of working in the engine room of a Federation starship felt disjointed, odd. He paused before agreeing.

"Can I wait?"

"You'll need to specialize by the end of the first quarter," the counselor said. "Otherwise you could end up taking a lot of classes outside your major. I advise you to go ahead and decide now."

"I'll wait," he said. "I have someone I want to ask." The counselor shrugged.

Commander Spock was easy to find. As far as Pavel could tell, he was the only Vulcan teaching at the Academy, offering seminars in the computer science department and teaching Vuhlkansu in the language department. If he was surprised when the young cadet showed up at his office unannounced, he didn't show it.

"Cadet Chekov," he said, standing up from his desk, his hands tucked formally behind his back. "What can I do for you?"

"I must declare major," he said, suddenly shy under the Commander's unblinking gaze. "Counselor says engineering, but not sure is best for me. Your suggestion, please?"

The Commander took a visible breath before answering.

"Each person must make that decision for himself," he said, and Pavel dipped his head, understanding the Commander's reluctance. It was, he thought, foolish to ask someone to make that decision for him. He turned to leave.

"However," the Commander went on, "it seems to me that anyone who thinks as you do—along every axis, able to anticipate the unpredictable moves of tri-dimensional chess—should logically consider navigation and the command track. Regardless of what you decide, I have faith in you."

And there it was, the answer he had been looking for. And more than that, had always somehow known was the answer and had only been waiting to hear it said aloud.

"Thank you," he said, giving the same impromptu bow he had done before in London. Again he turned to leave, and again the Commander stopped him.

"However," the Commander said, "you would be well-advised to spend your free time in the language lab."

"Understood," he said, nodding, and this time the Commander looked at him with the same impenetrable gaze that made Pavel feel he was being judged and found wanting.

At first Irina approved of Pavel's choice of nagivation science—even though it meant that they rarely had any classes together. And she applauded his increased commitment to improving his Standard and didn't complain about all the extra time he put in the lab.

At first.

But by the end of the first quarter, they were already drifting apart. As Pavel became more committed to his work at the Academy, Irina became less so. She began complaining about the work load, about the seriousness of her classmates, about the lack of free time. Twice she was reprimanded for unexcused absences from class. Her grades began to fall. She stopped asking Pavel to accompany her to social events, and by the end of the first semester they were only speaking by comm a couple of times a week. Before the end of the first year, Irina had dropped out, returning to Russia where Pavel eventually lost touch with her completely.

He missed her, of course, but he was so busy with his Academy work that he didn't have time to mope too much. When he thought about her at all it wasn't with as much sadness as it was gratitude—that she had been the reason he had considered coming to the Academy at all.

X X X

"Well done, Mr. Chekov," the captain says as soon as he returns to the bridge and takes his seat at the navigation controls. Pavel feels a flush of pride at the captain's praise, rarely given and valued more for being rare.

At his scanner, Mr. Spock straightens and says, "Still no sign of the Nexus, Captain."

"It won't do us any good to get the _Enterprise _moving again if we don't have a destination in mind. We have to find it."

"Sending the last known coordinates to your station," Mr. Spock says, and with a start Pavel realizes that he is talking to him. "You should be able to construct an equation that takes into account the speed and trajectory of the energy ribbon and extrapolate the likely current position."

It's a task Mr. Spock could surely do more quickly than Pavel can, and probably in his head instead of relying on the computer for help. Yet here he is, giving him this task.

As if he can read his mind, Mr. Spock says, "I will be in engineering assisting Mr. Scott in setting up the relays you suggested. You might want to examine the sensor logs to see if the Nexus' speed or position was altered by the objects it came into contact with. If so, you will need to factor in any known objects in its likely path as you determine its current location."

Mr. Spock takes a step toward the turbolift and for a moment Pavel feels his heart in his throat. If he gets any of the calculations wrong, the _Enterprise_ won't find the Nexus, won't be able to seal the rift between the universes in time to prevent disaster. Suddenly the weight on his shoulders is almost too much to bear. He calls out.

"Mr. Spock! Perhaps you should do this!"

He feels the captain's eyes on him, but it is Mr. Spock who responds.

"I have the utmost faith in you, Ensign," he says. "As I always have. Carry on."

**A/N: Oh, dear, I've lost some people along the way! The last chapter had half the number of usual readers. Perhaps everyone is busy reading in other fandoms right now, or perhaps this story just isn't working. For those of you who find your way here, your suggestions are appreciated! I have this story outlined to the end, but it's not set in stone, particularly if something would make it more appealing. **


	6. Going Home

**Home Chapter Six: Going Home**

**Disclaimer: Not my characters, just my mischief.**

"Come in, Lieutenant."

Uhura's head snaps up at the note of apology in Leonard McCoy's voice. "Believe me," he says, "we wouldn't ask you to do this if there was any other way."

Standing in the doorway of sickbay, the normally unruffled communications officer blinks once and looks down, a sign that she finds his request unpleasant. Or perhaps _unsettling_ is a better word. Un-something. Something she'd rather avoid.

Not that anyone he knows willingly submits to a Vulcan mind meld, but the lieutenant still looks pasty from the last one only hours ago. As far as McCoy knows, mind melds might be harmful in excess—or too disorienting to be tolerated well.

Nothing in the official literature suggests that's the case. He's looked, to no avail, through the medical databases. Of course, the damnable Vulcans aren't exactly forthcoming in information, citing cultural privacy issues. If mind melds _do_ have a deleterious effect on human participants, the Vulcans would be the last to let anyone know.

The silence stretches on. _Don't hurry her. If she says no—_

But she won't. He knows her. Never one to shirk her responsibility, even at a personal cost.

Her feelings about Spock, for instance, the way she thinks no one sees how she turns her attention to him like a tulip leaning toward the sun when he enters the room. How she struggles to stifle her playful affection around him, slipping up when he makes a rare visit to the rec room.

On the bridge working side-by-side she is the model of professionalism, any untidy emotion tucked away out of view.

Until recently McCoy was sure that Uhura's feelings for the first officer were as misplaced as poor Christine's, Spock either clueless or indifferent.

But now he's not so sure. The earlier mind meld had been a hint—Spock's hand spidering over Uhura's face until she went rigid, like someone juddered by an electric shock. McCoy had started forward but Jim pulled him back, saying, "It's okay, Bones."

The entire thing couldn't have lasted more than a couple of minutes but both Uhura and Spock looked drained and shaken afterwards.

More than that. Not just drained, but almost reluctant to part, their eyes lingering on each other for a few moments. Something there? Maybe. And it might be what's giving her pause right now.

"I know it makes you uncomfortable," McCoy says. "But you and Spock were able to contact the aliens before. Now that we've almost caught up to the nexus—"

With a sigh, she says, "I'll do it."

A noise in the corridor behind her catches her attention and she looks back, her hand still on the doorframe. Turning to face McCoy, she says, "Here he is."

"Good," McCoy says. "Go ahead and have a seat."

By the time Spock enters, Uhura has composed herself, sitting primly in one of the two chairs pulled together. McCoy taps open the intercom connection.

"We're ready when you are, Captain."

"We've got the nexus in visual range," Jim says, his voice sounding more confident than McCoy knows he feels. "Mr. Sulu's trying to get us a little closer but we don't want to risk getting drawn into the energy backwash."

"Captain," Spock says, directing his gaze to the mounted intercom on the wall, "if we set up a feedback loop in the deflector field, we may be able to approach closely enough to make a more detailed imprint of the energy signature. This phenomenon bears more careful study—"

"Not now," Jim says. "All we're doing is making sure these trans-dimensional beings don't rip our universe apart. Either convince them to settle in or out of the nexus—I don't care which. But they have to decide. Go ahead when you're ready."

"Understood."

If Spock is disappointed at the Captain's kibosh on further scientific inquiry, he doesn't show it. Instead, McCoy watches as he walks to Uhura and hesitates, his expression unreadable.

At least to McCoy. The lieutenant, by contrast, nods and says, "It's okay. Really," and only then does Spock lower himself into the other chair.

As he did during the earlier mind meld, McCoy has a sudden sensation of being a fifth wheel—or worse, a voyeur—as Spock brushes his fingertips over Uhura's temple and cheek.

"My mind to your mind," Spock says so softly that McCoy almost doesn't make out the words. But there it is again, the visible electric tremor that shakes them both. Both close their eyes and grow very still.

With a start McCoy realizes that he hasn't yet turned on his medical tricorder and he flips the switch and adjusts the range setting. Immediately the biometric indicators that measure brain activity ratchet up—something he noticed during the previous meld. This time, however, instead of leveling off after a few seconds, the tab continues to rise.

The separate monitor following Uhura's heart rate and basal temperature flashes a warning. She's in distress, her breathing labored.

Leaping forward and hammering the heel of his hand against the wall intercom, McCoy says, "Jim! We have to stop this! The meld isn't working—"

But before anyone from the bridge can answer, a humming, buzzing noise like a million bees forces him to clap his hands to his ears and the deck starts to shimmy. Jars and test tubes jostle and crash from the shelves. From the corner of his eye he sees a stack of PADDs and flimplasts bump and slide over the edge of his desk.

"Spock!" he shouts, expecting to see Spock and Uhura knocked out of their chairs or taking cover under a counter.

As if they are grounded by something larger than themselves, caught in their own personal vortex, Spock and Uhura are still seated as they were, their eyes closed, the fingers of Spock's right hand touching Uhura's face, both of them apparently oblivious to the growing shambles around them.

"Jim!" McCoy says, banging his fist again on the intercom button. "Bridge! Sickbay to Captain Kirk!"

"Daddy?"

A voice behind him cuts through the noise like something in a dream.

"Joanna?"

Even as he answers, the objective part of his mind knows he must be hallucinating, that his daughter is twelve parsecs away on Earth. Yet the illusion is so convincing that he turns halfway around.

There in the doorway is a willowy young teenager with the same honey-gold hair as her mother.

"Daddy?" she says again. "You're in danger here! You need to leave right now!"

"Why are you here?" McCoy says, stumbling forward, but Joanna fades backwards through the doorway and says, "You must hurry! You're in danger. You _all_ are! Tell them what they need to do!"

Struggling to stay upright as the ship dips and bucks, McCoy makes his way across the room but Joanna is gone, the corridor outside sickbay completely empty.

X X X

Leonard McCoy liked to say that his life didn't really start until the day it almost ended.

The transporter accident that derailed his life was a fluke, as rare as being struck by lightning or winning the lottery. Waking up in the hospital, tubes and electric leads taped to his arms and chest, he knew that his life would forever be divided into Before the Accident and After the Accident, a moment he would point to and say, "This. This is when everything changed."

Most of the changes were good ones—giving up his pipe dream of becoming a professional baseball player, for instance, and enrolling in med school like his father had wanted him to all along.

Others were good at first before turning sour—meeting Jocelyn at the rehab center and falling crazily in love and marrying her, an impulsive decision that years after the divorce still woke him up in a cold sweat at night, his heart hammering with anger and grief.

And Joanna. If he hadn't almost died that day in the transporter accident, he wouldn't have Joanna now. Or more precisely, Jocelyn wouldn't have Joanna. His contact with his daughter was constrained, at first by Jocelyn's remarriage and then by Joanna's choice, her resentment palpable when she was forced to spend weekends away from her friends, eating awkward meals with a father likely to be called away to an emergency surgery at the clinic.

Joining Starfleet had been yet another change.

"The _Enterprise_ gets back to Earth at least twice a year," he told Joanna, explaining his decision to take a post on a starship, "and I'm only a subspace call away if you need me."

To his relief she had bobbed her head and looked genuinely mournful, though two years into this mission, he could count the number of long conversations he'd had with her on one hand.

The day of the accident was so often a part of his dreams that he was longer sure what was memory and what wasn't. There he had been, waiting in line at the tiny transport station in the foothills of Georgia, joking with Sammy Deukers about the easy win over the Waleska Eagles—9 – 0, McCoy playing first base, Deukers in the outfield. Most of the team had already transported up to the orbiting hub to catch the cruiser to tomorrow's game in New Zealand, but McCoy was in no hurry.

Unlike his teammates, he knew this countryside well, having grown up and gone to college in Atlanta forty miles east. At this time of the year—early spring, after the threat of cold snaps was over—Georgia was in bloom—azaleas and dogwoods and redbuds and peach blossoms—all wafting a heady odor in the mellow air. The minor league farm team he had played for since graduating from Emory University rarely got back to this part of the country, and McCoy stood in the waning afternoon light and gave himself over to the bittersweet pleasures of nostalgia and homesickness.

"Your turn," Deukers called, and McCoy waved him on.

"Go ahead," he said, hefting his duffel on his shoulder as Sammy stepped onto the transporter pad. In another moment, Sammy disappeared in the familiar hum and sparkle and the transporter operator was motioning him forward.

And that was the last thing he remembered until he woke up, strapped down and taped up like some science project gone horribly awry.

Much, much later he would find out that a freak power surge had interrupted the transporter matrix as his molecules were in flux. For more than 70 seconds he existed as pure energy as the operators on Earth and on the orbiting hub frantically tried to keep the signal intact. Someone later showed him one of the news vids—a harried-looking hub chief assuring the press that the accident had been minor, that no real damage had been done.

As if a life turned upside down and put on hold wasn't worth noting.

For the first few days no one thought he would pull through. He had reassembled on the hub transporter pad unconscious, dying, his heart stopped, his brain shorted out. Medics shocked him back to life—or back from the edge of the grave—and he was transferred to a critical care unit where he wavered in and out of consciousness for another 43 days.

By the time he could sit up and follow simple commands, he was transferred once more, this time to a rehab center near Atlanta. McCoy was certain that his father, a well-respected thoracic surgeon, must have pulled strings to get him there, the best facility for traumatic brain injury on the East Coast.

At first his time at rehab was a blur of frustration. He hadn't spoken since the accident, not that he had forgotten how but because the effort was too great. Opening his mouth and taking a breath, shaping his lips and tongue and exhaling seemed like more trouble than it was worth. What did he need to say, anyway? He was fed and clothed and bathed without having to speak at all.

Yet he knew something was missing, that this existence was just that, a mere existence. Limbo. Waiting.

Another month passed and he began to sense impatience in the people caring for him. Not that the nurses were short-tempered or even curt when they spoke, but they started to treat him less like a person and more like an object, as if his silence meant he had no feelings or expressions or desires at all.

And then he met Jocelyn.

A medical student studying occupational therapy, she was assigned to him as she began her residency at the rehab center. Pretty and petite, she was one of those women who seemed oblivious to her own beauty, perpetually surprised at compliments or dismissive of them. She wore no makeup and kept her hair in a severe ponytail. When she took his hands in hers and uncurled his fingers or cupped her palm around his waist and rocked him unsteadily to his feet, McCoy saw that her nails were short and unpolished, her hands calloused like someone used to hard labor.

From his landlocked positions in his bed or wheelchair, McCoy watched as a tall, lean intern tried mightily to impress her over the course of several weeks, watched with the indifference of a weary spectator watching a sport whose rules he had forgotten. At every turn Jocelyn appeared to go out of her way to snub the eager young doctor-in-training until he finally gave up and stopped his pointless flirtations.

McCoy was oddly relieved.

"You are the only man I know," she said one day as she adjusted the training braces on his knees, "who knows how to listen."

He smiled then and let out a faint puff of air, his approximation of a laugh. Jocelyn looked up in surprise and returned his smile.

"So, you understand more than you've been letting on. And all this time I thought my secrets were safe with you."

For a frantic moment he tried to remember what secrets she might have told him, but she smiled again and he realized she was teasing him. With a renewed effort, he smiled again and opened his mouth to reply.

"Still…safe," he said, almost gasping. Jocelyn rocked back on her heels.

"Those are the first words I've heard you say since I got here! You've been holding out!"

"Been waiting," he said, his voice rusty from disuse, "for you."

If she found the intern's suave flirtations annoying, Jocelyn was charmed by McCoy's hard-won sentence fragments. For the first time since the accident he had things he wanted to say. His body, however, lagged behind his interest, his words slurred, his endurance giving out suddenly.

Jocelyn didn't seem to mind. Like him, she was caught in some sort of nexus of time, waiting, in limbo.

The list of things he had to relearn was longer than the things he knew how to do. He came to dread and even despise being hooked up or strapped into contraptions designed to help him recover.

"I feel like Dr. Frankenstein's monster," he groused to Jocelyn as she reset the monitor tracking his eye movements as he practiced using an old-style computer input keyboard.

"Stop being such a technophobe," she chided. "Fifty years ago you wouldn't have survived this kind of accident. You should be grateful this medical equipment even exists."

"Fifty years ago," he quipped, "private citizens weren't traveling by transporters."

"Then you could have crashed your flitter or fallen down the basement stairs," she replied, one eyebrow arched, cutting off any rejoinder he was tempted to make. She was right, of course, but it didn't stop his heart from hammering every time he had to surrender control to some machine.

"A normal reaction," his therapist assured him. "A machine almost cost you your life. You'd rather not tempt fate again."

But he _had_ tempted fate again, though it hadn't felt like it at the time.

Two weeks after he was discharged from rehab, he and Jocelyn were married by a justice of the peace and moved into an apartment in Decatur near his old college stomping grounds. That fall he enrolled in his first medical school class while Jocelyn finished up her residency and started looking for work.

Compared to the path behind them, the one stretching ahead seemed easy. Marital bliss, Jocelyn's excitement about beginning her career, the relief of starting what he now felt called to do—to be a good old-fashioned jack-of-all-trades internist—McCoy later thought that they could have been forgiven for expecting nothing else.

Jocelyn's unexpected pregnancy changed everything again.

_She_ was furious. _He_ was stunned.

But then he fell in love with the idea of having a child—a child! To be able to share what little wisdom he had, to lavish the kind of tenderness his own father had given him on a son or daughter. A child was a wonderful gift! A heart-pounding happiness flooded him and slapped a silly grin on his face that nothing could wipe off.

Not even Jocelyn's growing discontent.

At first McCoy pretended that pregnancy was the culprit—the physical discomfort, the inconvenience. Although he and Jocelyn talked about her continuing to work, she turned down a good job offer, saying she wanted to spend her energy raising their child—though she seemed more angry than excited about it.

"It's not what I had planned," she complained, ducking her cheek away as he tried to kiss her out of her bad humor.

After Joanna was born—a daughter, a beautiful, wonderful daughter!—he thought Jocelyn would be as smitten as he was, but caring for an infant was exhausting work, and since he was busy with school, the burden fell on Jocelyn.

When he was home McCoy was glad to take over the childcare. No matter how tired he was, no matter how sleep deprived, he loved watching his daughter blossom from mewling baby to curious crawler to fearless climber. Every scrape, every tumble, every shriek of pain or fear knifed through his stomach and sent him in a tailspin of personal recriminations, for of course they were his fault. If he had only been more attentive, Joanna would not have felt pain.

His coursework and the looming medical exams took him away more and more. By the time Joanna celebrated her second birthday, he had started sleeping on a futon in the spare room so as not to wake Jocelyn when he came in late or got up early. Time at home became so rare that one day he managed to arrive for supper and was startled to see that Joanna had changed into a child he barely recognized, self-contained, chatting away to her mother, offended deeply when he tried to serve her milk in a sippy cup.

"I'm not a baby!" she scolded.

And then before he knew it, they were gone.

"I've met someone," Jocelyn told him, and what could he say to that?

The transporter accident that had brought them together began to feel like the most definitive thing that had ever happened to him, that everything since had fallen apart so slowly that by the time he noticed, it was too late to try to recover all the drifting pieces.

In some ways it made him a better doctor. At least he wanted to believe it did. As a young wannabe ball player he had been unaware of the pain of others, or if he had known that a friend was in distress, he'd been hesitant to reach out.

Then the accident had been a call to rethink his priorities—and losing his family had been another.

It wasn't enough to _acknowledge_ someone's pain. He needed to _do_ something about it.

"That's your problem," Jocelyn told him once, back in the days when he still thought they had a future. "You feel things too much. It'll be your undoing."

X X X

"Joanna!"

McCoy calls down the empty corridor, not expecting any reply. The buzzing, whirring noise is everywhere, growing so loud that he buckles over in genuine pain.

"Tell them, Daddy! Tell them what you know!"

The weight of the noise pushes him down until his knees hit the cold deck. Closing his eyes, McCoy struggles not to throw up as the ship's anti-gravity does a bob-and-weave.

What did she mean, tell them what he knows? Of course Joanna isn't here, he knows that. She's an artifact of his mind, his mind that's trying to tell him something.

_He's_ not the one who can communicate with the trans-dimensional aliens. That's why Spock and Uhura are in sickbay right now, locked together in some preternatural glue. All _he_ knows is what everyone knows, that because the aliens function as a group mind, they have to inhabit the same space. However, the part of the group caught in the nexus wants to stay there, but the others want to go home.

Why would anyone want to stay here, in this noisy pain-filled place—for now he knows that this is where they are, that the _Enterprise_ is being pulled into the energy ribbon.

"It can be whatever someone wants it to be," her hears Joanna say. "You could go home again and be with me and Mommy."

"You know that's not possible," he says through gritted teeth, and the voice at his ear says, "Of course it's not. Not really. But you could convince yourself that it's real. The Nexus is everyone's best dream. That's why these aliens don't want to leave."

"They have to leave," McCoy says, trying to open his eyes. His vision swirls and he shuts his eyes again, pressing them tightly closed. "If they don't, everyone will die. This universe will die. Because of who they are, because of _how_ they are, they can't stay here without destroying everything."

The whirring and buzzing is suddenly a decibel softer, lower.

"Can you tell them, Daddy? Tell them about home."

Steadying his breath, McCoy says into the void, "If you stay here, you will lose your home. You will lose yourself, your family, those who mean something to you. I don't know anything about you, but I do know that home means something to you. Don't let it slip away. I've done that before, and you won't ever recover."

The ship gives a violent shake and then rights itself and is still. McCoy is on his back in the corridor, his hands pressed to his ears. Cautiously he lowers them and listens. The cacophony of bees is gone, replaced by the staccato whoop of red alert.

A touch on his shoulder—and he whirls around, expecting to see his daughter's face.

But Lieutenant Uhura is there, Spock standing slightly behind her.

"You did it, Dr. McCoy," she says. "They're leaving."

**A/N: Please forgive the tardy update. RL has been a challenge lately, but I've started working on the 7****th****—and last—chapter of this story. I never abandon a story, so even when I'm late to the party, I get there! Thanks for all the kindness shown in reading and reviewing! You keep me writing.**


	7. Kirk

**Chapter Seven: Kirk**

**Disclaimer: Don't own. Don't even rent. Just play for free.**

"They're gone, Jim!"

In the sudden silence, Dr. McCoy's voice blares over the intercom more loudly than usual. The only other noises on the bridge of the _Enterprise_ are the ambient hums and beeps of control panels returning to normal after the shaking that knocked one crewmember out of her chair.

_When is Starfleet going to wise up and install seat belts?_

Jim Kirk brushes away the thought and focuses on the import of Bones' words. The aliens have left—which means that they either chose to join the others in the Nexus or convinced the others to leave it and return to their home world. Either way, this universe is no longer being torn apart.

Slamming his fist on the arm of his chair, Kirk says, "Mr. Scott, report."

"Captain, ye need to see this," Scotty says. "That energy burst fused the bypassed relays. I have to take the warp drive offline. The dilithium matrix has been out of specs ever since those beasties left the ship. I can't get the mains back up until we figure out how to shift the signature to the proper alignment, relays or not. It will take some time to reset everything. Don't ask to go anywhere for a wee bit. "

The engineer's brogue is thicker than usual, a sure sign he's stressed. Kirk nods and says, "Understood," as the turbolift door whooshes open. Spock and Uhura exit, and something about they way they do catches Kirk's attention. They are neither touching nor looking at each other, yet the captain instantly feels like an interloper, as if his gaze in their direction is an unwanted intrusion.

Frowning, he tries to sort out what has changed between them—or perhaps what has always been there unseen—as he walks toward the lift.

"Spock," the captain says, and without a word Spock swivels and follows him back to the turbolift while Sulu signals to his relief helmsman and steps up to the captain's chair.

As soon as the lift doors shut, Kirk palms the control and says, "You okay?"

It's the kind of question that can ruffle Spock's feathers, earning whoever asks it a mini-lecture on the imprecision of language or the vagaries of emotion. Kirk lifts his hand to forestall an answer.

The lift jerks hard, knocking him backward.

"What the—"

"Captain!" Sulu's voice on the intercom, barely audible over the buzz of static. "The energy ribbon has slowed its forward motion and we're being pulled toward it by the gravimetric backwash."

"Get us out of here," the captain says, but Sulu's voice comes back immediately.

"I've tried full reverse but the impulse engines aren't enough to break us free. We need warp drive."

The lift judders as it starts again, and in a moment the doors open to engineering. Seeing Scotty hovering over the control kiosk, Kirk hurries to him, Spock right behind.

"Aye, you see the problem," Scotty says, pointing to one of the indicators. "Until we get the crystals realigned, we cannae go anywhere—at least not anywhere very fast. And even the impulse engines are threatening to redline if we strain them. You need to get away from that energy drain right away so I can start repairs."

Spock steps closer to the kiosk.

"Helm reports an inability to move the ship from the pull of the Nexus," he says. Kirk sees Scotty's face blanch and then flush.

"Captain, if we don't break away—" he says, but Spock interrupts him.

"Captain, theoretically, we could fire a photon torpedo into the Nexus and disrupt the gravimetric field enough to break away."

"You _could_," Scotty says quickly, "if the torpedoes were online. When the relays went down, they took the weapons with them."

Kirk shivers involuntarily at an image of the _Enterprise_ defenseless, almost motionless, flicked by tendrils of energy from the Nexus.

"When the Enterprise encountered the Nexus earlier," Spock says, "Mr. Sulu used the deflector shields to isolate the ship from the worst of the ionizing radiation of the Nexus. Perhaps we could—"

"Aye!" Scotty says, almost happily. "That might work!"

"What might—" Kirk begins, playing catch up.

But Spock has already stepped around him, his fingers flying across the control monitor. Scotty bobs and weaves behind him, eyeing the changing indicators.

"We could concentrate the wavelength _here_—" Scotty says, touching the screen. Spock gives a curt nod, his eyes still focused on the data stream scrolling past.

With the kind of intuitive leap that often serves him well in command, Kirk suddenly understands what Scotty and Spock are doing.

"You're going to simulate a photon blast using the deflector shield," he says, but neither Scotty nor Spock looks up. Kirk scans the power fluctuations and taps the corner of the screen, opening a tab that shows a real time projection.

_Four minutes_. They have to get everything in place in four minutes or the _Enterprise_ will be sucked into the Nexus and trapped there.

"I'll control the energy capture," Scotty says. "And Mr. Spock will direct the deflector burst from here. But captain, someone has to manually set the dish array—"

"I'm on it," Kirk says. He's fairly certainly Scotty is going to suggest Chekov or another crewmember for the task, but there's no time. Besides, he's relieved to have an excuse to move. "I'm heading there now."

From the corner of his eye he sees Scotty's mouth opening like a fish and Spock turning toward him, most likely to challenge his decision. Before anyone can say a word, Kirk sprints across engineering and turns down the corridor leading to the section with the deflector dish controls.

Often compared to a blue unblinking eye on the front of the _Enterprise_, the deflector array makes space travel possible. In normal space it sets up a resonating harmonic shield and scoots it in front of the ship like a bubble, pushing away space debris that could tear a hole through the titanium hull like a bullet through butter. During warp travel, the deflector array is slaved into the engines, generating a cocoon around the ship so it can slip through the warp corridor without damage.

The controls are tucked behind a lockbox with a large "Danger" sign plastered across the cover. Tapping in his security code and palming his identity, Kirk swings the cover open on its hinges. In the corner of his eye he notes a redshirted engineer coming up behind him to help.

Pulling his communicator out and flipping it open, he says, "Ready here."

"Captain," Spock says, and Kirk thinks he hears a note of disapproval in his voice. Well, it isn't the first time Spock has given him the raised eyebrow of skepticism. Hopefully it won't be the last, either.

"I can handle it, Spock," he says, as much to reassure himself as to convince his first officer.

"Wait until I patch the coordinates to you," Scotty chimes in. "If the pushback from the energy burst is like I think it will be, the adjustment won't hold. You'll have to keep an eye on the axis bar—"

"Thank you, Mr. Scott, but I think I know what to do."

Already rocking as the Nexus gravimetric field pulls them forward, the _Enterprise _begins to shake in earnest. Kirk feels the deck beneath his feet vibrate and he reaches out to steady himself with one hand on the bulkhead next to the array control.

"Sending the coordinates now," Spock intones over the comm, and Kirk leans forward and grips a metallic bar and starts to twist it to the right, all the while keeping one eye on the digital scale across the top of the screen. A series of numbers tick past. When the set coordinates appear, he stops turning the bar and reaches up to engage the lock.

The ship shakes harder and Kirk struggles to keep his balance. Feeling his hand starting to slip on the metal bar, he redoubles his grip and pushes. Nothing. The bar toggles down despite Kirk's efforts to hold it steady. The numbers on the digital scale start moving, the coordinates now off.

"Captain!" Scotty's voice, telling him what he already knows. If he can't align the array, Spock won't be able to send an energy burst through to the heart of the Nexus—hopefully pushing the _Enterprise_ back and out of harm's way. Grunting with the effort, Kirk grabs the bar with both hands and pulls. It doesn't budge.

"Help me!" he calls.

Over his shoulder a pair of hands emerges—the redshirted engineer finally stepping in. Kirk moves his hands to one end of the bar and the engineer grasps the other. By now the ship is shaking so hard that staying upright is becoming a serious issue. Twice Kirk loses his footing and falls to one knee. Twice he grabs the bar again, putting all his strength behind it. Finally it starts to move—slowly at first and then more smoothly, the numbers across the top of the monitor slowing and then stopping at the correct coordinates.

An unfamiliar mechanical whine grows louder until it crescendos in one uncomfortable sustained note.

The energy burst, Kirk knows, coursing through the array. He keeps his hands on the metal bar, willing it not to move.

The ship lurches once more and then is unnaturally still, not even the faint vibration of the impulse engines noticeable. The only sound Kirk hears is his own ragged breathing and the hoarse cough of the engineer at his side.

"I think we did it," the captain says, uncurling his fingers from the array controls and flexing them experimentally. "I think we've broken away."

He turns to give the engineer an appreciative nod.

It's not an engineer.

The man at his side is older, dressed not in a red engineering shirt but in an unusual red jacket trimmed in white, his black trousers piped in matching cording. A gold Starfleet pin near his shoulder catches Kirk's eye—as do the captain's epaulets across his shoulders.

Kirk gives a violent shudder.

_Someone's walking on my grave_, his grandmother used to say, referring to some mysterious internal calculus that would occasionally make her pause in whatever she was doing. He'd never understood her until now.

"You're—" he says, and the older man squints his eyes at him and then breaks into a grin.

"James T. Kirk," he says. "But I think you already know that."

X X X

"Give up!"

Jim Kirk's face was pressed into the rich dark loam of Iowa, his nose and mouth full of dirt. On his back he felt the heavy knee of his older brother Sam keeping him pinned to the ground.

"No!" Jim spluttered. "Get off me!"

"Give up," Sam said again, this time more softly. "Give up and I'll get up."

Instead, Jim jerked his head around and shook it, like a dog bothered by fleas.

"No!" he said. "NO!"

At once the pressure on his back eased as Sam stood up.

"You're gonna get yourself killed that way," Sam said. "You need to know when you're beaten."

Too tired to answer, Jim bent his elbows and shakily lifted himself up. Sam stood to the side, his arms crossed, watching his younger brother. When Jim's knee gave way and he tottered forward, Sam's hand snaked out to grab him.

"Don't," Jim said, but Sam ignored him, righting him on his feet.

"Second mistake," Sam said. "Not accepting help when you need it."

Jim started to answer when a voice broke over the yard.

"Boys!" their mother called. "I need some help in the kitchen."

Instantly the rivals were allies again, the ordinary wrestling match in the yard already filed away as _what brothers do_.

"Mom," Sam called, "Jim and I have to return Mr. Johnson's truck. We'll be back soon!"

That wasn't exactly a lie—their neighbor lent them his truck to haul a load of hay earlier in the afternoon—but he'd never been fussy about how long the boys needed to use it or when they had to return it. Neither Sam nor Jim, however, enjoyed helping Winona in the kitchen. A gifted scientist in a biology lab, she was a nervous cook, bossy and scolding when her sous chefs were less than helpful.

The truck was parked near the equipment shed and both Sam and Jim sprinted to it, not waiting on their mother's permission. Sam climbed in the driver's side and Jim settled himself in the passenger seat.

The truck was a technological anomaly, a ground car rather than a hovercraft, run by a combustible engine and moved forward on wheels. The Kirks did own a serviceable service flitter for work around the farm but the truck was so much more _fun_ to operate—and far less predictable. It was, for instance, prone to breaking down, sometimes stranding the boys with no other way home than to walk.

Which is exactly what it did on the way out to Mr. Johnson's farm. As Sam headed up a slight incline in the road, the truck sputtered as the engine began to stall.

"Uh oh," Sam said, lifting his foot off the gas and letting the truck come to rest in a shallow ditch.

Already the sun was almost below the horizon. With a sigh, Jim unlatched the door and climbed out, scanning the distance for another ground car. Nothing. Nor would there likely be anything, not out here on the flat prairie, five miles from anyone.

"I'll call mom," he said, pulling his comm from his pocket, but Sam stopped him.

"It's not that far. Let's walk back."

Ordinarily Jim might have protested. But an image of his mother—annoyed at having to pause in her dinner preparations to come fetch them—made him hesitate. He resigned himself to walking for an hour in the dark.

After locking the truck, Sam started down the road back the way they had come, Jim trailing behind. The rarely used road was uneven, the pavement buckled in places, and more than once Jim tripped and caught himself.

"Be careful back there," Sam called over his shoulder. Jim chafed at the brotherly condescension in his tone, but he noticed that Sam veered off the road and walked along the edge instead.

"Pay attention to yourself," he called back.

The sun was gone in no time, the sky changing from violet to black sooner than Jim would have imagined. He pulled out his comm and flicked on the flashlight, aiming it a few yards ahead, the circle of light catching Sam's retreating back. Sam apparently needed no such help, walking forward into the dark.

And then to Jim's astonishment Sam disappeared from view.

"Sam!"

Jim hurried forward and skidded to a stop at the edge of a washed out gully, aiming his flashlight down. Eight feet below the surface of the road, Sam lay on his back, one leg pinned beneath him.

Without thinking, Jim scrambled over the side and slid to the bottom.

"Can you get up?" he asked, but Sam grunted in pain.

For several minutes Jim crouched beside his brother, waiting as Sam's breathing slowed and steadied as he sat up and tentatively moved his leg from under him.

"Okay, let's try it now," Sam said, leaning on Jim's shoulder and levering himself to his feet. Immediately he sat back down, grimacing in pain.

"I'm calling mom," Jim said, but Sam's hand darted out and grabbed his comm.

"No!" he said. "Give me a minute."

"We already tried that," Jim said. "We need help!"

"Give me a minute!" Sam said again. He stood up and wobbled—and Jim slipped quickly under his left shoulder and put his arm around him.

"Okay, we got this," Sam said. Jim wasn't sure.

The climb out of the washout took twenty minutes. The walk the rest of the way home took another two hours, Sam leaning heavily on Jim the entire way. By the time they opened the front door of their house they were both so tired and sore that Winona took one look at them and stifled whatever tirade she had been ready to unleash.

"You could have called," she said as they sat heavily on the floor and untied their dusty shoes, her comment more like an afterthought than a real scolding.

"I didn't need to," Sam said, reaching out and ruffling his brother's hair, startling him. "I had Jim."

X X X

"This is the _Enterprise_?"

The older Kirk cranes his neck back and looks around the room where the deflector array is housed.

"Yes," Jim says. "My ship. How did you get here?"

"Not sure," the older man says, taking a step back, still giving appreciative glances at everything around him. "I was on the ship—a christening, I think. Yes, a christening. Not my _Enterprise_. A publicity tour—a jog to Jupiter and back—a news junket, really. And something happened. We ran into an energy flux—"

"Like an energy ribbon," the younger captain supplies, and Kirk nods.

"I came here," Kirk continues, "to work on the deflector shield. We were going to use it to escape the gravimetric tug—"

"By focusing the array and sending an energy burst through it, like a photon torpedo," Jim says, and the older Kirk nods slowly.

"Exactly," he says. "So why am I here now, watching my younger self do the same thing?"

"The Nexus," Jim says. "We rescued an alien crew who were trapped in the Nexus. They said it was a kind of a portal where they could live in multiple dimensions at once, fulfilling all their desires."

"Sounds like fun," the older man says, flashing another grin. Just as quickly, however, his smile fades and he says, "Actually, I don't believe that for a moment. Getting everything you want would be boring."

Looking around, he says, "Not this, though. The _Enterprise_ is never boring."

Then squaring his shoulders, he turns back to Jim and says, "So, why am I here? Because I've been in the Nexus before? Or because I'm still there and you are a hallucination?"

"Or you were there and have traveled back to now, when the ship is faced with a threat."

"How convenient for you," the older man says. "Getting a hand from yourself just when you needed it. There's another possibility, of course. I'm dead, or you are, and we are meeting in some unimagined afterlife."

"I'm not dead," Jim says with conviction. The older man tilts his head slightly and seems to be consulting an internal voice.

"I'm not as sure as you are," he says at last. "I've always thought I'd die alone. But you're here. So maybe I'm not dead."

A grin, sly and toothy, slides back across his features.

"Unless you don't count," he says.

"Spock may know—"

"Spock is here?"

The older Kirk seems both startled and eager. Jim points down the corridor toward engineering. "He's there, with Scotty, manning the other part of the deflector program."

"Scotty, too? Then by all means, lead on."

As Jim turns he feels a wave of dizziness and his palm is suddenly on the deck, the raised design pressing into his hand, his knees slammed hard into the metal.

"Sir!"

A young engineer grips his forearm and lifts as he gets to his feet.

"Are you alright, Captain?"

"I'm...just a dizzy spell. I'm fine. Thank you, lieutenant."

He stands for a moment before looking around. No one other than the young engineer is in the corridor.

"Did you see…anyone else?" he says, but she shakes her head.

"No, sir."

And he knows it's true, that no one else is here. Perhaps never was. Or perhaps will be in the future. Closing his eyes briefly, he takes a breath and tries to get a sense of the older man's presence.

"Sir?"

Opening his eyes, he is strangely bereft. "I'm fine. Thank you," he says before heading down the corridor.

Only later, after Scotty and his crew have gotten the warp core operational and the ship is safely on the way to Starbase 11, does Jim pause long enough to consider what happened. On his way from the bridge to his quarters he makes an unplanned detour to sickbay, half hoping that Bones won't be there, not sure if he really wants to confide what he saw.

But Bones is there—his medscanner in his hand, Spock sitting primly on a biobed.

"Captain," Spock says, standing up.

"Oh, Jim," the doctor says, waving him over, "I'm glad you're here. Have _you_ had any headaches lately? Any weird reactions? Something about this Nexus thing did a number on some of the crew—"

"What about you?" Jim says, ignoring Bones' question by directing his attention to Spock.

"Some discomfort, which the doctor has been unable to remedy."

"Now wait a minute, you haven't even tried—"

"Not casting aspersions on the good doctor's abilities, are you, Spock?"

"Merely stating facts, Captain."

McCoy lets out an audible huff.

"If you two aren't going to listen to sage advice, you can leave my sickbay right now."

"But I need you, Bones. We all do."

Jim intends it as a playful riposte but his words sound more serious than he intends. Not, however, less sincere.

For a moment McCoy stands between the two men, glancing from one to the other.

"You know," he says, exasperated, "you two beat all. _You_—" he says, pointing his medscanner in Spock's direction, "pretend you don't need help from anyone. And _you_," he says, waving his hand at the captain, "think your help is indispensable—"

"So it all works out in the end," Jim says, trying to jolly McCoy into a better mood. "Something I learned a long time ago—the importance of depending on each other. The importance of family."

He watches as McCoy's frown resolves into something less intense, something more sardonic and less annoyed.

"You never answered my question," McCoy says. "You got a headache or not?"

"Nothing a glass of bourbon wouldn't take care of," Jim says. "How's that? I not only diagnosed myself, I prescribed the cure."

"You're a starship captain, Jim, not a doctor. Leave the practice of medicine to me."

"So you don't have any bourbon stashed away in a drawer somewhere?"

Jim knows he does—knows, in fact, that McCoy will welcome sharing it with him. He even knows that Spock might agree to a glass as well, if not for the alcohol, then for the flavor, something he has from time to time expressed an appreciation for.

With a sigh, McCoy throws up his hands as if in surrender.

"Bar's open, gentlemen," he says as he leads the way to his office. "Don't make me drink alone." Jim darts a glance at Spock and meets his eye, one eyebrow raised in a question.

"Come on, Spock," Jim says. "It's been a long day."

As soon as he says it he anticipates Spock's response—a prissy reminder about the number of hours in a standard day, or a pretended misunderstanding of the metaphor.

But Spock surprises him.

"Agreed," he says. "And as the good doctor says, we shouldn't leave him to drink without adequate companionship."

"No one should be alone," Jim murmurs, and Spock tilts his head and nods, agreeing with him twice during the same conversation; a record, surely.

The image of the older Kirk is already starting to feel more like an echo than like a real encounter. Someday he'll ask Spock or McCoy about it—or maybe later tonight, after they've had a drink or two.

But he's already sure what they will say, that it doesn't matter what he thought he saw. What matters is that he was where he needed to be when the ship needed him, when his crew needed him, everyone strengthened by the others, like the sum of the parts, like family.

The End

**A/N: Thanks to everyone for sticking with this story! Let me know if you enjoyed it...or even if you didn't. I'm always trying to improve my writing and your feedback is helpful.**

**As for why the older Kirk showed up on the ship, in Star Trek: Generations, the _Enterprise_ encountered the Nexus and Kirk disappeared and was presumed dead while trying to tinker with the deflector shield. Later when Captain Picard needed Kirk's help, he was able to travel in time to stop a madman. If not then, why not here? Hope it made sense!**


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